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Why do people share political information and misinformation online? Developing a bottom-up descriptive framework
Get PDFSocial media users are key actors in the spreading of misleading or incorrect information. To develop an integrative parsimonious summary of social media users’ own accounts of motives for sharing political information, we conducted: 1. a literature review of motives for personally sharing false information as reported by social media users; and 2. qualitative research concerning these motives using an innovative, ecologically valid method. Based on our findings, we developed a pool of items evaluating social media users’ motives for sharing false political information, which we then tested and analysed the dimensionality of in 3. a preregistered questionnaire-based study in order to identify key clusters of users’ own accounts of motives for sharing both true and false political information. The current findings show that there are distinct sets of motives people report for their misinformation sharing behaviour: prosocial activism, attack or manipulation of others, entertainment, awareness, political self-expression, and fighting false information. Also, these sets of motives are associated with variables known to predict sharing misinformation, and some of these sets predict social media users’ self-reports of having shared misinformation in the past. Our findings highlight and elaborate on users’ motives that reflect a concern with 'making things better' and acting in a manner that is beneficial to society as a whole, and suggest that different interventions may be required to combat misinformation sharing driven by different motives. A potential set of 18 items that could be used in questionnaires measuring motivations for sharing political news online is described
Solving the SME finance puzzle: an examination of demand and supply failure in the UK
Get PDFFollowing economic instability after the Global Financial Crisis, the financing of small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) growth and productivity has become central to UK government policy for sustainable economic development, evidenced by the establishment of the British Business Bank and Regional Investment Funds.
This paper considers demand-side and supply-side failures in the contemporary UK SME finance market. Adopting mixed methods, binary logit regression analysis of the 2015 UK Small Business Survey of 15,502 SMEs is sense-checked using qualitative participatory findings from 6 SME finance support advisors.
Findings confirm the importance of SME size, age, management capability and use of appropriate, timely external advice. They support the resource-based view of SME access to finance, contributing to borrower discouragement and under investment, suggesting the need for improved support to upskill entrepreneurs’ financial management and investment readiness and the concept of an ‘holistic entrepreneurial finance ecosystem’ approach to assist UK SME finance
Plyometric training practices of Brazilian Olympic sprint and jump coaches: Toward a deeper understanding of their choices and insight
Get PDFPlyometric exercises are widely used by coaches from numerous sports, during different phases of the annual training season. In more general terms, plyometrics (or stretch-shortening cycle [SSC] exercises) can be characterized by the rapid transition from the deceleration (e.g., drop landing) to the acceleration phase (e.g., a vertical jump) or by the combination of eccentric and concentric contractions. The efficiency of the SSC to improve the subsequent motor-task (e.g., a maximal vertical or horizontal jump) is well established in the literature and relies on the mechanical properties of the muscle-tendon complex. During plyometric activities, the muscle-tendon complex stores potential elastic energy in the eccentric phase, restoring part of this energy during the concentric portion of the movement. This, in turn, results in increased force and power production, as a result of the SSC potentiation. Several studies have examined the influence of this enhanced effect on the physical performance of athletes from different sports, ages, and competitive levels, confirming that plyometric training is an efficient and safe strategy to improve speed- and power-related capabilities
Arboreal methodologies: Getting lost to explore the potential of the non-innocence of ‘nature’
Get PDFThis paper recounts a workshop that took place in a polytunnel in a forest school in Sligo, North-West Ireland on a cold day in early-December. The event sought to materialise ‘arboreal methodologies’ (Osgood, 2019; Osgood & Odegard, 2022; Osgood & Axelsson, 2023) which are characterised by the enactment of feminist posthumanist praxis to engage in world-making (Haraway, 2008) intended to unsettle recognisable tropes of biophilia that have come to frame both child and nature in narrow ways. The arboreal methodologies that adult participants were invited to mobilise were situated, material, affective, and involved metaphorical and material practices of ‘getting lost’ through ‘childing’. The workshop invited a sense of wonder at the ways arboreal methodologies might offer possibilities to confront human exceptionalism and wrestle with our complex, often contradictory relationships to ‘nature’ that might then go on to inform practice with young children. The approach taken involves methodologies without method (Koro-Ljunberg, 2016) to bring speculative, embodied encounters in the forest, together with unlikely tales of how forests work on and through us. We pursue a critical, tentacular engagement with the forest and take seriously its potential to agitate familiarity and strangeness, wonder and fear, nature and culture. In this paper we re-encounter embodied becomings-with the forest to think and sense other ways to take life in the Plantationocene (Tsing, 2015) seriously
Lupus anticoagulant testing: Dilute prothrombin time (dPT)
No full textLupus anticoagulants (LA) rarely affect routine prothrombin time assays because the high phospholipid (PL) content in thromboplastin reagents tends to overwhelm the antibodies. Dilution of thromboplastin to create a dilute prothrombin time (dPT) screening test renders the assay sensitive to the presence of LA. Technical and diagnostic performances are enhanced if recombinant thromboplastins are employed in place of tissue-derived reagents. Presence of an LA cannot be deduced from an elevated screening test alone since other coagulation disturbances can prolong clotting times. Confirmatory testing with less dilute or undiluted thromboplastin reveals the PL-dependent nature of LA by reducing the clotting time relative to that of the screening test. Where appropriate, such as a known or suspected coagulation factor deficiency, mixing tests are valuable in correcting factor deficiencies and evidencing inhibitory properties of LA, to increase diagnostic specificity. Although LA testing is commonly restricted to dilute Russell's viper venom time and activated partial thromboplastin time, dPT is sensitive to LA unreactive in those assays, and inclusion in routine testing increases detection rates of clinically significant antibodies
Digital badges for digital scholarship: Teaching basic research skills to pre-sessional students
No full textUsing digital badges to motivate and reward students for researching, evaluating and referencing information sources
Complacency in fire evacuation from buildings: A technical research report into evacuee complacency, an overlooked component of fire safety management, from the IOSH Fire Risk Management Group
Get PDFThis survey involves 413 participants in a questionnaire survey to determine their experiences and attitudes to complacency in fire situations from their own experiences. The survey details the factors that contribute to complacency in terms of human behaviours and looks into human factors that could be utilised to reduce vulnerability and attitudes to fire which may affects people sense of fear and wellbeing in emergency situations. Aspects of fire risk management and fire safety culture have been considered in their interfaces with complacency to determine which additional factors come into play and how influential factors can be used positively to raise the profile of fire safety awareness to reduce vulnerability and risk
For a new sociology of social love
Get PDFLove is a theme at the centre of all our lives, including those of sociologists and social scientists. It has been widely addressed and described in literature and poetry, extensively depicted in the pictorial arts, sung about in music. Even philosophy, from its very beginnings, has devoted beautiful and intense pages to this theme. For reasons difficult to understand, the founding fathers of our discipline have been reluctant to enter the analytical realm of love. They touched this theme, but only marginally. It is only relatively recently that more insightful and focused discussions have come from some key figures of contemporary sociology in works by Niklas Luhmann, Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Zygmunt Bauman and, more recently, Eva Illouz that demonstrate the profoundly social nature of our most intimate feelings and convey how the transformation of love and intimacy is related to wider social changes. In this sense, this collection edited by Silvia Cataldi and Gennaro Iorio aims to fill a major gap, while fuelling the debate on social love and its implications as a transformative force in an era characterised by multiple crises. By bringing together scholars from across several countries, not only it collates the fruit of years of research, but it also launches new developments in the debate on social love and set a new research agenda
Learning from labour: Critical pedagogy for working students: Project preliminary report
No full textThis study has sought to investigate student work life and its impact on learning at a post-92 HE institution. Previous research, including a small-scale study at Middlesex University, established that disadvantaged, first-in-family students may be exposed to the detrimental effects of precarity when financial hardship forces them into part-time low-pay/low-skilled jobs. Debates have ensued about student agency overcoming challenges and generating resilience. A significant amount of research has been built on student employment primarily in the education and management fields. Interest reflects a global rise in working students’ and worked hours’ numbers, raising concerns about work-study balance. Issues of inequality have been related to the differential impact of work and financial pressures, primarily affecting ‘atypical’, ‘first-in-family’ and working-class students. Management studies focus on youth’s transition to work and labour market impact in employing industries like hospitality and retail with concerns about growing precarity, generational work attitudes, retention and turnover. HR and employment studies have been less forthcoming as student jobs are considered short-term or amalgamated into the wider fold of precarity. Unlike the above, this study focuses on the student workplace experience exploring task performance. It aims to learn about the subjective and objective constraints and opportunities to their labour power and its impact on learning. Findings should lay the basis for renewing teaching and learning practices framed by critical pedagogy and recommendations to educational and industry institutions to pursue compatibility between work and higher education.
The research employed a mixed method approach including a survey, semi-structured interviews as well as in-class reflective exercises and analyses of reflective essays on task performance and workplace experiences. The study presents a picture in line with national and local data about trends in student labour market engagement and employment as adjusted by the pandemic watershed.
We tested the hypothesizes that student workers’ social suffering from precarity, and incompatibility between work and study might have been underestimated and, consequently, that a stronger link exists between bad jobs and bad education than previously acknowledged. If this is the case, then it is not allegedly poor education that prevents students’ labour market success but, conversely, it is the latter, due to the various forms of suffering it causes, that prevents students from fully benefiting from their learning opportunities. Therefore, post-92 universities that rely so heavily on such students should not be unfairly blamed for failing students’ employability outcomes. However, recognition of the significant challenges student face should lead universities as well as students and educators to turn these struggles into an opportunity for collective, social and pedagogic, innovation.
This report is structured as follows: after a brief review of existing literature, we outline the project aims, its pedagogic and research strategy. Preliminary survey data analysis includes the description of the sample and findings on student labour market engagement, the terms of employment, conditions at work and specifically data on rights violations and student knowledge of them. The last sections analyse the labour process based on student’s accounts of workplace challenges and coping strategies. Conclusions are followed by initial recommendations
Hannah Arendt’s action theory, aesthetics and feminist curatorial praxis
Get PDFThis article considers the relationship between action (Arendt) and aesthetics in curatorial projects with feminist concepts. I suggest that Hannah Arendt’s theory of action provides the connection between aesthetics and the notion of action in feminist curatorial praxis. The vision of feminism discussed here refers to the desire to understand matters from the specific point of view of women and considers the distribution of power and potentiality in various levels of life. The feminist theory in this research aims to reveal, show, and transform cultural, historical and social structures. From a broader perspective, living in the neoliberal realities alongside capitalist and patriarchal state structures provides multiple reasons and a rationale for collectively forming a new foundation of resistance. Feminism emerges in and through curatorial actions involving varied artistic expressions of freedom, discontent, etc. Four case studies concerning women as subjects are investigated, whose subject is migration and border-crossing, and both works and exhibitions are compared in terms of their curatorial approach, the level of action and their aesthetics methods