Scientific Culture and Public Education

Current science and science-friendlyphilosophy jointly yield a picture of the world andourselves in it that is more substantial, detailed andcoherent than any other produced before by naturalphilosophy. When carefully formulated this pictureprovides us with: (a) an unprecedentedly reliablerepresentation of vast regions of the natural world;and (b) a non-arbitrary public framework forunderstanding and furthering important areas of publicconcern. This paper comments on the cultural andeducational significance of this picture. Influentialarguments against granting a privileged role toserious science on the basis of differentialcredibility are examined and found wanting. Thisresult is then folded into an analysis of thesignificance of scientific thought and practice for acautious conception of the goals and methods of publiceducation.     

Revealing the decision-making of dribbling in the sport of futsal

ABSTRACT

This study aimed to investigate why futsal players decide to dribble. For this purpose, we analysed 396 trials comprising the dribbles (n = 132), passes (n = 131) or shots (n = 133), performed by 70 male futsal players. Passing and shooting angles, and interpersonal distance, including their rates of change (velocity and variability), were regarded as measures of interpersonal coordination tendency and a comparison was made among dribbling, passing and shooting situations. In addition, the variables identified as constraints on deciding to dribble were analysed in relation to age categories, dribbling outcomes and futsal court zone. Results revealed that passing and shooting angles, and interpersonal distance showed higher variability in dribbling than in passing and shooting situations. The findings allowed us to conclude that decision-making on dribbling was influenced by the variabilities of passing angles as well as shooting and interpersonal distance, and that success in dribbling was affected by the variability of interpersonal distance. Such variabilities were interpreted concerning their meaning of risk and/or uncertainty in the execution of motor skills.     

Context-based assessment: creating opportunities for resonance between classroom fields and societal fields

There is on-going international interest in the relationships between assessment instruments, students’ understanding of science concepts and context-based curriculum approaches. This study extends earlier research showing that students can develop connections between contexts and concepts – called fluid transitions – when studying context-based courses. We provide an in-depth investigation of one student’s experiences with multiple contextual assessment instruments that were associated with a context-based course. We analyzed the student’s responses to context-based assessment instruments to determine the extent to which contextual tests, reports of field investigations, and extended experimental investigations afforded her opportunities to make connections between contexts and concepts. A system of categorizing student responses was developed that can inform other educators when analyzing student responses to contextual assessment. We also refine the theoretical construct of fluid transitions that informed the study initially. Implications for curriculum and assessment design are provided in light of the findings.     

Introduction: Intercultural Studies within Central States

The study of intercultural communication (IC) has a long history in the Central States Communication Association (CSCA). Some of the earliest work in IC has come from universities in the CSCA region, such as Indiana University (William Starosta) and University of Minnesota (Vernon Jensen and Rosita Albert). Since the inception of the Intercultural Communication Interest Group within CSCA in the early 1990s, IC scholars have contributed immensely to the discipline by studying different aspects of the relationship between communication and culture. Several active IC scholars present their recollections of the development of IC research in this issue.     

Financing innovation: A bibliometric analysis of the field

This article presents a bibliometric analysis of the financing of innovation during the period 2001–2016. Among the most prominent journals in the field are Research Policy, Technovation and Small Business Economics; among the most influential authors are Petersen, Hall, Himmelberg, Lerner and Brown; and the most connected documents are those by Hall (2002) and Brown, Fazzari, and Petersen (2009). The field is fragmented and uses a variety of financial theoretical models. Salient topics in the field are financial constraints, funding sources (internal and external), capital structure, venture capital and financing of technology companies.     

Performance indicators for research and cultural creation activities in polytechnic higher education institutions: a consensus building approach

Tertiary Education and Management - This article presents a set of performance indicators based on the Portuguese case for managing the performance of research and cultural creation activities and...     

LABRADOR: Efficiently publishing relational databases on the web by using keyword-based query interfaces

A vast amount of valuable information, produced and consumed by people and institutions, is currently stored in relational databases. For many purposes, there is an ever increasing demand for having these databases published on the Web, so that users can query the data available in them. An important requirement for this to happen is that query interfaces must be as simple and intuitive as possible. In this paper we present LABRADOR, a system for efficiently publishing relational databases on the Web by using a simple text box query interface. The system operates by taking an unstructured keyword-based query posed by a user and automatically deriving an equivalent SQL query that fits the user’s information needs, as expressed by the original query. The SQL query is then sent to a DBMS and its results are processed by LABRADOR to create a relevance-based ranking of the answers. Experiments we present show that LABRADOR can automatically find the most suitable SQL query in more than 75% of the cases, and that the overhead introduced by the system in the overall query processing time is almost insignificant. Furthermore, the system operates in a non-intrusive way, since it requires no modifications to the target database schema.     

Interpreting Research on Parent Involvement and Connecting it to the Science Classroom

As part of a larger project, we found that there are very few articles focusing on the relationship between parent involvement and student achievement in science. Furthermore, most studies are quantitative in nature (based on large-scale surveys). Despite the gaps identified, there are many consistent findings across various studies that could be transferred to the science-learning context, for example, the significant effect of parents' aspirations/expectations on student achievement. To better present the findings from our review of the literature, we proposed a model for organizing the various categories of parent involvement at school into three dynamic dimensions: home environment, parents and school/community, and students and school/community. We feel that this model provides a framework for recognizing the roles that parents and their children may be already playing (agency) in triggering involvement at home, at school, and/or with community organizations.     

Resolving ambiguity in biomedical text to improve summarization

Access to the vast body of research literature that is now available on biomedicine and related fields can be improved with automatic summarization. This paper describes a summarization system for the biomedical domain that represents documents as graphs formed from concepts and relations in the UMLS Metathesaurus. This system has to deal with the ambiguities that occur in biomedical documents. We describe a variety of strategies that make use of MetaMap and Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) to accurately map biomedical documents onto UMLS Metathesaurus concepts. Evaluation is carried out using a collection of 150 biomedical scientific articles from the BioMed Central corpus. We find that using WSD improves the quality of the summaries generated.