Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud,London, and the importance of place

While recent debate has often focused on a reified “cultural value” (whether opposed to or aligned with monetary value), this article treats “value” as a verb and investigates the acts of valuing in which people engage. Through ethnographic research in London's electronic music scene and social network analysis of the SoundCloud audio sharing website (which is dominated by electronic dance music and, to a lesser extent, hip hop), it uncovers substantial patterns of geographical inequality. London is found at the very centre of a network of valuing relationships, in which New York and Los Angeles occupy the next most privileged locations, followed by Berlin, Paris, and Chicago. Cities outside Western Europe and the Anglophone world tend to occupy peripheral positions in the network. This finding suggests that location plays a major role in the circulation of value, even when we might expect that role to have been curtailed by an ostensibly “placeless” medium for the distribution and valuing of music. While there are reasons for the metropolitan emplacedness of dance music – given the importance of the relationship between production, consumption, and live DJing – the privileging of particular cities also mirrors patterns of inequality in the wider cultural economy. That London should appear so supremely privileged reflects both the exporting strength of British creative industries and the imbalanced nature of the UK's cultural economy.     

Perceptions of Reform-Based Teaching and Learning in a College Mathematics Class

This study investigated, from the students',professor's, and researchers' perspectives, the effects of a reform-based introductory undergraduate mathematics course, and the efforts of a mathematics professor to teach such a course. The class had been designed for teacher candidates of middle school mathematics and science (Grades 4 to 8) but was open to all qualified students. We addressed the following research question: What perceptions about learning and teaching mathematics emerged through the participants' experiences in a reform-based mathematics course? Results of the analysis of the data suggested that the teacher candidates and the professor took an important first step toward enculturation into a reform-based vision of mathematics learning and teaching. Implications for mathematics faculty and teacher education faculty interested in promoting reform-based mathematics are presented.     

Researcher and experiences of adults in biographical research – based on andragogical projects

ABSTRACT

On examining today’s research practices in the area of social sciences, one can perceive a distinct interest in biography. Observation of the lives of individuals, (re)cognising social micro worlds from the perspective of individual biographies, and analysis of – and searching for – meanings of individual life experiences are subjects of great interest as well as confidence among researchers. It is also noticeable that researchers, with even greater attention and concern, are turning their attention to the methodological legitimacy and correctness of the projects they undertake. This is especially important when there is a necessity to problematize and further specify the methodological identity of the biographical approach. The article is a contribution to the discussion concerning the nature and types of so-called biographical research conducted in the area of andragogy – which may adopt at least three differing forms: biographical, auto/biographical and autobiographical approaches.

It is also our intention to reflect on the research process as a learning process, experienced by the researcher-andragogue. These reflections are based on the individual experiences of researchers acquired during the Microworlds of motherhood and Life between the notes projects, in which the biographical and auto/biographical approach was applied.     

Youth unemployment and health outcomes: the moderation role of the future time perspective

International Journal for Educational and Vocational Guidance - The extent to which young people think about the future, called time perspective, and their affective view (positive/negative) was...     

Quality incentive based congestion control for multimedia communication over IP networks

In this paper we introduce a framework for using quality as an incentive to promote proper application level congestion control. Through integrating a joint-source channel coder and feedback-based congestion control scheme, we are able to construct accurate and efficient quality incentives. The framework is applicable in all network architectures where end-to-end congestion control may be used, and is as such not specific to either best-effort or traffic class-based architectures. The concept is presented along with preliminary simulations that highlight the resulting rate control accuracy. We also discuss how to implement some well-known congestion control schemes within our framework.