1,721,146 research outputs found
Designing Transdisciplinary Engineering Programmes: A New Wave in Engineering Education
Full text linkTraditional engineering programmes equip graduates with knowledge and skills that enable them to achieve great technological advancements. However, one of the flaws of current programme design is that what is taught is often compartmentalised into pockets of knowledge potentially leading to a loss of perspective. Engineering students are highly applied and solution-oriented, but many times do not hold a holistic view of other associated professional dimensions. This can be detrimental in fast-paced changing environments, where they are exposed to global challenges spanning multiple disciplines. The question is how can we, as educators, overcome these flaws? We argue that providing innovative engineering education programmes that combine technical training and skills with social-scientific and policy knowledge is key. This creates the premises for new generations of graduates who possess a transdisciplinary skillset thus “speaking multiple professional languages” and filling a clear gap on the employment market, as studies have shown. We present a case-study focused on the new engineering programme at University College London (UCL): the BSc Science and Engineering for Social Change. Here, we offer students an authentic learning experience using project and problem-based approaches to contextualise learning in diverse environments. Projects are set in collaboration with community partners who provide real-world socio-technical challenges for students to solve. Students get to simultaneously apply the technical and social science skills they learn, constituting a true transdisciplinary engineering experience enabling them to thrive in the professional world
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A Transdisciplinary Engineering and Systems Approach for Decarbonizing UK Home Heating
Full text linkAt present, only around 10% of the heat pumps required to reach our critical 2050 climate goals are being installed in the UK. The government has set ambitious targets to phase out gas boilers by 2035, replacing them with heat pumps. This paper argues that instead of viewing the low carbon heating transition as a simple techno-economic issue, solved by a technology swap, we need a transdisciplinary systems approach to address this complex socio-technical challenge. Drawing on previous research and the literature we identify the current level of heat pump uptake and consider some of the barriers to the low carbon heating transition including technical aspects, installers skill shortages, financial barriers and informational challenges. We find that these barriers are mostly addressed in silos without considering the interrelationship between different aspects. Heat pumps should be considered in the context of a whole house approach to retrofit and barriers need to be overcome to make the technology more attractive to households. In this paper we call for a systemic, transdisciplinary approach to the low carbon heating transition to accelerate uptake: combining an understanding of social, engineering and policy perspectives. Key to this are systems-based methods and transdisciplinary approaches that enable engineering and engineers to be part of the solution. We present the benefits of this approach and suggest some principles for further research
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Youth, skills, and informal sectors in the Global South: theoretical and methodological lenses on learning and livelihoods
No full textEducation and training have largely failed to respond to the needs of those who generate livelihoods outside of the formal economy. Neglect of the informal sector is partly due to it eluding ‘legibility’: states generally only ‘see’ what can be measured and perceived to contribute to officially valued forms of economic activity, creating a formality bias. The illegibility of the informal sector is exacerbated under conditions of neoliberalism, as it often fails to conform to imperatives of productivism, forms of production in which paid employment is segregated from other aspects of life, with economic development and growth seen to be their main objective. Seeing like a neoliberal state therefore results in the neglect of informal modes of production, which are not seen to carry value. The formality bias is also evident in relation to vocational education and training (VET), with productivist assumptions underpinning VET as an institution that is oriented towards the needs of industry. Global South VET systems are rigid, unresponsive to changing local labour markets, and unable to adapt to the needs of the fast-changing informal sector. VET policy and practice utilised by international development agencies and individuals, as well as by national governments, has largely ignored or denigrated the informal sector. In this chapter, we try to challenge the view that the informal sector holds little value, showing the range of ways young people make a living in and beyond it and the role that education and training usefully plays or could play in supporting these endeavours. If scholarship is to assist in making education and training systems more responsive to the needs of the informal sector, this will require a rethink of dominant ways of theorising and researching learning for livelihoods. There remains a need for deeper theorisation of the skills needed for living in the world in relation to oneself, to others, and to the environment while being sensitive to the development of inclusive and sustainable economies
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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