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Roundtable of Liam Campling and Alejandro Colás, Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, organized by Valerie Burton with a response by the authors
Get PDFUnderstanding utility essentials of e-learning management systems in higher education: a multi-generational cohort perspective
Get PDFThis research aimed to explore the nuances of utility in components of E-Learning systems by using a multi-generational undergraduate business school cohort programme and an e-learning utility-satisfaction evaluation model. Our empirical research demonstrates differences between the three generations for the utility of all the variables of the E-Learning systems components, with varying differences in the relationships between Generation X, Y and Z. Furthermore, we show course development, learner support and user characteristics influence results demonstrability which has a high influence on overall satisfaction. We established nuances in the learning utility essentials in courses on E-Learning systems for multi-generational cohorts; revealed the utility of learner support as a key differentiator and developed a model on utility-satisfaction with reasonable explanatory and predictive power. The model possesses the dual advantages of fewer constituent items and the connective capability to link utility to satisfaction to enable E-Learning systems evaluation and ease for identifying areas for improvement in E-Learning course delivery
The role of chromatin modifications in the evolution of giant plant genomes
Get PDFAngiosperm genome sizes (GS) range ~2400-fold and comprise genes and their regulatory regions, repeats, semi-degraded repeats, and ‘dark matter’. The latter represents repeats so degraded that they can no longer be recognised as repetitive. In exploring whether the histone modifications associated with chromatin packaging of these contrasting genomic components are conserved across the diversity of GS in angiosperms, we compared immunocytochemistry data for two species whose GS differ ~286-fold. We compared published data for Arabidopsis thaliana with a small genome (GS = 157 Mbp/1C) with newly generated data from Fritillaria imperialis, which has a giant genome (GS = 45,000 Mbp/1C). We compared the distributions of the following histone marks: H3K4me1, H3K4me2, H3K9me1, H3K9me2, H3K9me3, H3K27me1, H3K27me2, and H3K27me3. Assuming these histone marks are associated with the same genomic features across all species, irrespective of GS, our comparative analysis enables us to suggest that while H3K4me1 and H3K4me2 methylation identifies genic DNA, H3K9me3 and H3K27me3 marks are associated with ‘dark matter’, H3K9me1 and H3K27me1 mark highly homogeneous repeats, and H3K9me2 and H3K27me2 mark semi-degraded repeats. The results have implications for our understanding of epigenetic profiles, chromatin packaging and the divergence of genomes, and highlight contrasting organizations of the chromatin within the nucleus depending on GS itself
Learning to explore distillability and sparsability: a joint framework for model compression
Get PDFDeep learning shows excellent performance usually at the expense of heavy computation. Recently, model compression has become a popular way of reducing the computation. Compression can be achieved using knowledge distillation or filter pruning. Knowledge distillation improves the accuracy of a lightweight network, while filter pruning removes redundant architecture in a cumbersome network. They are two different ways of obtaining model compression, but few methods simultaneously consider both of them. In this paper, we revisit model compression and define two attributes of a model: distillability and sparsability, which reflect how much useful knowledge can be distilled and how many pruned ratios can be obtained, respectively. Guided by our observations and considering both accuracy and model size, a dynamic distillability and sparsability learning framework (DDSL) is introduced for model compression. DDSL consists of teacher, student and dean. Knowledge is distilled from the teacher to guide the student. The dean controls the training produced by dynamically adjusting the distillation supervision and the sparsability supervision in a meta-learning framework. An alternating direction method of multiplier (ADMM)-based knowlege distillation-with-pruning (KDP) joint opimization algorithm is proposed to train the model. Extensive experimental results show that DDSL outperforms 24 state-of-the-art methods, including both knowledge distillation and filter pruning methods
Exploring the over-time variation in customer concerns on sharing economy services
Get PDFThe sharing economy represented by Airbnb has evolved rapidly, it is particularly important to identify and understand how consumer concerns change over time. As a result, this study employs structural topic modelling, using room type and time as covariates, to extract topics from 896,658 Airbnb reviews in London and to observe the variation in the prevalence of topics over time. The findings show that the topic proportion changed relatively sharply in the early years of Airbnb (2010-2013) and during the Covid-19 pandemic (2020-2022), but relatively smoothly in the middle period (2014-2019). This research also discovered that the proportion of topics on customers' special experiences has been decreasing while the proportion of topics on their overall experience has been increasing. This shift could be attributed to an increase in the number of professional hosts, which has accelerated the standardisation of the Airbnb service
Disability coaching in a pandemic
Get PDFPurpose: An applied study using convenience data was conducted to compare the experiences of neurodivergent adults undergoing workplace coaching before and during the pandemic.
Design/Methodology/Approach: The naturally occurring opportunity permitted a comparison of face-to-face and remote coaching in three cohorts, pre-pandemic (100% face-to-face), forced remote (100% remote) and choice (remote or face-to-face; 85% selected remote). A total of 409 participants self-reported performance before and 12 weeks after completing an average of 11 hours coaching.
Findings: Significant differences between before and after scores for performance, with large effect sizes, were reported for all three cohorts across six dependent variables: memory, time management, organisational skills, stress management, understanding neurodiversity and concentration. There was no significant difference between the cohorts in terms of the magnitude of the effect. We found significant differences between the cohorts in terms of which topics were chosen as foci for the coaching, with executive functions related topics becoming less popular in the choice cohort.
Implications: We abductively reasoned our results to suggest a positive relationship between personalized environments and cognitive demands for this client group. We call for further, theoretically grounded research exploring the role of coaching and environment in understanding the work performance of neurodivergent adults at work.
Originality: The study contributes to the emerging knowledge on the different experiences of in-person and video-mediated coaching. Our focus on neurodivergent employees, which are heretofore less well researched within the workplace, provides essential data to support practitioners in maximizing opportunity for a marginalized group
First episode psychotic mania and its aftermath: the experience of people diagnosed with bipolar disorder
Get PDFBackground: Optimal intervention for bipolar disorder (BD) is seen as a priority within early intervention psychosis services. This is the first study to explore the experience of first episode psychotic mania and its aftermath for people diagnosed with BD, and the potential implications for treatment. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 young adults following first episode psychotic mania and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Results: Two overarching themes were identified: (i) ‘Changing states of self during first episode’; (ii) ‘Struggling with loss of self during episode aftermath’. Participants experienced exceptional, persecutory and angry states during psychotic mania that led to identity disruption and low feelings or depression post-episode. Some mourned the loss of their exceptional manic self, and attempted to relapse into mania, while others struggled with the loss of who they had been prior to their episode. Conclusion: Results emphasise the importance of understanding identity change during first episode psychotic mania and how that might be used to address identity disruption and low feelings during recovery. This process is likely to be pertinent to early intervention and prevention of manic relapse following first episode BD
Situating masculinity, labour migration and care over the life course in Lesotho: foregrounding survivor bias in researching care
Get PDFThe literature on later life care is dominated by a focus on women as carers, on older people as receivers, not providers of care, and by the analytical disembedding of care from wider social and economic processes. We examine the experiences of care and caring of former labour migrants who had migrated from Lesotho to work in South Africa’s mines to examine how these have changed over their lives. The later demanded the tying of experience into wider social, economic and demographic processes. The research identified a methodological issue in the study of later life care: survivor bias
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