1,720,999 research outputs found
Ethics as commodity in higher education of South African natural science and engineering students
Get PDFThe fields of the natural sciences are increasingly shying away from purely theoretical approaches to knowledge and are instead looking toward real-world applications and products to be derived from research projects. This phenomenon is seen even in the academic setting, which increasingly seems to mimic the goals of the outcome-driven engineering world. Such developments are deemed necessary in a worldwide economy that is driven more by practical economic results and less by the ideal of contributing to discipline-specific facts and knowledge. This shift in research-perspective means that science and engineering are faced with a host of ethical and social issues which extend beyond the confines of the laboratory. With these changes, the importance of an ethical grounding for graduate students becomes ever more pressing. This article will look at the influence that a purely positivist worldview may have on the ethical and value-related education of university students in the natural sciences and engineering. It will attempt to show how the teaching of ethical approaches need not be seen as an obstacle for the training of a potential scientist or engineer, but rather as an opportunity for growth in the individual as a contributing member of his or her society and immediate community. A solution to this continually growing need for ethical grounding is suggested: educators should look at the underlying worldviews and collateral or hidden curriculum (that which is not taught formally in classes, but which the students learn anyway) and the null curriculum (that which is not taught in classes) to provide their students with ethical guidance, rather than simply focusing on adding extra ethics modules to highly technical university or college courses
Embodied digital technology and transformation in higher education
Get PDFBackground: The use of digital technology in higher education is overwhelmingly positively assessed in most recent research literature. While some literature indicates certain challenges in this regard, in general, the emphasis is on an encouragement and promotion of digital technology in higher education. While we recognised the positive potential of the use of digital technology in higher education, we were cautious of an instrumentalist and disembodied understanding of (digital) technology and its potential impact on higher education – as a sector of education and as a body of students.
Aim: To re-conceptualise the way in which technology is understood for its use in the higher education sector, as is argued, would be of benefit for transformation in higher education.
Setting: South African Higher Education sector.
Methods: Phenomenology of embodiment.
Results: An embodied understanding of technology through the embodied phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and an explication of its potential for transformation in higher education via the working concept of the Embodied Screen leads to a full understanding of the student as embodied and socially-embedded individual.
Conclusion: A more holistic and embodied understanding of digital technology serves to supplement transformation in higher education, especially if transformation is itself understood in concrete social and bodily terms as is the case in the South African context
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Towards a better understanding of alkene metathesis: elucidating the properties of the major metal carbene catalyst types
No full textThe difference in activity of metal carbene catalysts has a major influence on the efficiency and application of these metal carbenes as metathesis catalysts. The focus of this research is to examine the properties of the major metal carbene catalyst types to understand the general activity trend. A comparative investigation of the foremost Fischer-, Tebbe-, Grubbs-, and Schrock-type metal carbenes was done using a qualitative structure–activity type computational method via principal component analysis. The effect of the change in metal atom as well as the change in ligands was specifically considered. Four Fischer-, a Tebbe-, five Grubbs-, and a Schrock-type carbene were investigated in this regard. Geometry optimizations of all species were done at the GGA/PBE/DNP level with Materials Studio DMol3 and subsequent single-point energy calculations were done with Gaussian at the PBEPBE level with the cc-pVQZ-type basis sets. Results showed that the descriptors extracted by the principal component analyses could successfully reproduce or match the generalized trend for metathesis activity, highlighting the importance of the frontier orbitals in the metathesis reaction.National Research Foundation (South Africa
Geographical information system software as in-house chemical indexing database for catalyst screening of alkene metathesis catalysts
No full textLarge amounts of chemical information can be indexed on various databases. If these databases store information in an appropriate format for specific search queries, we can perform a catalyst screening from intelligent searches. However, little to no database applications are flexible enough to allow for simultaneous screening and comparable visualizations. Therefore, for setting up a flexible in-house database, we propose the use of geographical information system (GIS) software. GIS includes an attribute table that can be populated with text and numerical information. From this table, we could selectively screen our data as well as visualize the different values on an intelligently created grid pattern. Consequently, 11 types of alkene metathesis catalysts together with 9 Grubbs-type catalysts were investigated using GIS techniques. GIS proved to be an efficient and versatile tool whereby quick and successful catalyst screening could be don
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe 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
- …
