Self-esteem and academic achievement: a comparative study of adolescent students in England and the United States

Utilizing mixed methodology, this paper investigates the relationship between self-esteem and academic achievement for young adolescents within two Western cultural contexts: the United States and England. Quantitative and qualitative data from 86 North American and 86 British adolescents were utilized to examine the links between self-esteem and academic achievement from the beginning to the end of their academic year during their 11th–12th year of age. For both samples, quantitative results demonstrated that fall self-esteem was related to multiple indicators of later year academic achievement. While country differences emerge by the end of the year, math appears to have a consistent relationship with self-esteem in both country contexts. Qualitative analyses found some support for British students’ self-perceptions as more accurately reflecting their academic experience than the students from the United States.     

Academics’ job-related stress and institutional commitment in Hong Kong universities

Tertiary Education and Management - Recent developments in higher education have placed greater emphasis on performance and accountability and raised concerns about increasing levels of stress...     

Raiders of the lost archives

ABSTRACT

Fantastic Man (2014) and Searching for Sugar Man (2012) mobilize tropes of discovery occurring in the filmed process of collecting and curating the work and identities of two reluctant, elusive, and resistive figures. These documentaries are part of a discourse of collectability marked by the urge to discover and narrate a “quest” that has its precedents in record collecting as obsessive cultural practice and in the fetishizing of obscurity. Furthermore, they can be seen as “performances” of the artiste and repertoire (A&R) process but for a “post-rock” era in which the customary roles of A&R have largely been eclipsed by social, economic, and technological changes to the music industry: the “(re-)discovery” of Onyeabor and Rodriguez exemplifies an increasingly common fusion of, rather than oscillation between, novelty and nostalgia in the music industry, as “old” artists are “newly” discovered through practices of media archaeology aimed at unearthing artifacts of cultural and economic value from an ever bigger and denser digital archive.     

An End to Disabling Policies? Toward Enlightened Universal Service

This article argues that an enlightened, inclusive vision of universal service is possible by learning lessons from disability. Telecommunications policy has historically built in norms that needlessly exclude people who are regarded as having a disability and therefore being outside of the mainstream. Accordingly, universal service policies focus on availability and affordability of telecommunications services, rather than on their accessibility and functionality. The article shows how rethinking universal service through disability can lead to inclusive policies that benefit everybody.     

Dielectrophoretic manipulation of ribosomal RNA

The manipulation of ribosomal RNA (rRNA) extracted from E. coli cells by dielectrophoresis (DEP) has been demonstrated over the range of 3 kHz-50 MHz using interdigitated microelectrodes. Quantitative measurement using total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy of the time dependent collection indicated a positive DEP response characterized by a plateau between 3 kHz and 1 MHz followed by a decrease in response at higher frequencies. Negative DEP was observed above 9 MHz. The positive DEP response below 1 MHz is described by the Clausius-Mossotti model and corresponds to an induced dipole moment of 3300 D with a polarizability of 7.8×10(-32) F m(2). The negative DEP response above 9 MHz indicates that the rRNA molecules exhibit a net moment of -250 D, to give an effective permittivity value of 78.5 ε(0), close to that of the aqueous suspending medium, and a relatively small surface conductance value of ～0.1 nS. This suggests that our rRNA samples have a fairly open structure accessible to the surrounding water molecules, with counterions strongly bound to the charged phosphate groups in the rRNA backbone. These results are the first demonstration of DEP for fast capture and release of rRNA units, opening new opportunities for rRNA-based biosensing devices.