The media construction of the sports’ elite from the European perspective: an analysis of the European Symposium of Sports 2010

Since the first Olympic Games, the figure of the athlete has roused enormous passion. One may wonder if nowadays the cultural mechanisms that produce them are analogous and perform the same functions as in the past. This article aims to answer these questions. For this purpose, we have relied on the analysis of the discourse from different actors in the 2010 European Symposium of Sports “Thinking Sports, Transforming Society: The EU in favor of citizenship for the XXI Century”. The results will provide relevant information about the responsibility of the mass media in the production of a sports spectacle, the role of the big brands and the exemplarity of the sports’ elite. In this manner, the need was conveyed of producing a different view of sports, so that in the contest between humanistic values and materialistic values, those who contribute to the welfare of the citizens could achieve glory.     

The Perceived Impact of Eight Systemic Factors on Scientific Capital Accumulation

Minerva - In the global academic capitalist race, academics, institutions and countries’ symbolic power results from the accumulation of scientific capital. This paper relies on the...     

Strategic Embodiment in Virtual Spaces: Exploring an on-line discussion about sexualities equality in schools

This paper analyses patterns of participation on a voluntary anonymous Web-based discussion forum, open to students and faculty in one UK university, concerning sexualities equality in schools. Analysis revealed that participants often rejected the security of anonymity and strategically embodied themselves and others (as gay, straight, parents, etc.) to provide authority and ethical grounding for certain arguments. These embodied arguments invited engagement and promoted dialogue. We found that while personal embodiments were crucial for meaningful interaction, they also brought the risk of personalizing systematic inequality and fostering a victimization discourse. In the light of this, we argue that both individual and collective perspectives are crucial for promoting sexualities equality in school.     

Document retrieval on repetitive string collections

Most of the fastest-growing string collections today are repetitive, that is, most of the constituent documents are similar to many others. As these collections keep growing, a key approach to handling them is to exploit their repetitiveness, which can reduce their space usage by orders of magnitude. We study the problem of indexing repetitive string collections in order to perform efficient document retrieval operations on them. Document retrieval problems are routinely solved by search engines on large natural language collections, but the techniques are less developed on generic string collections. The case of repetitive string collections is even less understood, and there are very few existing solutions. We develop two novel ideas, interleaved LCPs and precomputed document lists, that yield highly compressed indexes solving the problem of document listing (find all the documents where a string appears), top-k document retrieval (find the k documents where a string appears most often), and document counting (count the number of documents where a string appears). We also show that a classical data structure supporting the latter query becomes highly compressible on repetitive data. Finally, we show how the tools we developed can be combined to solve ranked conjunctive and disjunctive multi-term queries under the simple \({\textsf{tf}}{\textsf{-}}{\textsf{idf}}\) model of relevance. We thoroughly evaluate the resulting techniques in various real-life repetitiveness scenarios, and recommend the best choices for each case.     

The Public Library System as an Element in the 2007 and 2015 Electoral Programs of Spain's Political Parties in the Region of Castilla-La Mancha

To assess the relevance of the Public Library System in the political agenda, programs presented by the Political Parties competing in Regional and Local elections in the Spanish Region of Castilla-La Mancha were analyzed and the proposals about these library institutions were identified.

All Regional programs were collected and also an ample sample from the Municipalities for the 2007 and 2015 elections, trying to find the differences influenced by the impact of the financial crisis and recession on the public-library policies.

The conclusion arrived at was that, although the Public Libraries may be reasonably present in the studied programs, there is a low awareness by the Political Parties of the main problems.     

Open access megajournals: The publisher perspective (Part 1: Motivations)

This paper is the first of two Learned Publishing articles in which we report the results of a series of interviews with senior publishers and editors exploring open access megajournals (OAMJs). Megajournals (of which PLoS One is the best known example) represent a relatively new approach to scholarly communication and can be characterized as large, broad‐scope, open access journals that take an innovative approach to peer review, basing acceptance decisions solely on the technical or scientific soundness of the article. This model is often said to support the broader goals of the open science movement. Based on in‐depth interviews with 31 publishers and editors representing 16 different organizations (10 of which publish a megajournal), this paper reports how the term ‘megajournal’ is understood and publishers’ rationale and motivations for launching (or not launching) an OAMJ. We find that while there is general agreement on the common characteristics of megajournals, there is not yet a consensus on their relative importance. We also find seven motivating factors that were said to drive the launch of an OAMJ and link each of these factors to potential societal and business benefits. These results suggest that the often polarized debate surrounding OAMJs is a consequence of the extent to which observers perceive publishers to be motivated by these societal or business benefits.     

Sex differences in self‐estimation of multiple intelligences among Portuguese adolescents

This study investigated the relationship among sex, attitude toward intelligence, and self‐estimation of multiple intelligences for self and parents among Portuguese adolescents in secondary schools. Two hundred and forty‐two adolescents estimated their own and their parents' IQ scores on each of Gardner's 10 multiple intelligences: verbal (linguistic), logical (mathematical), spatial, musical, body‐kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, existential, spiritual, and naturalistic. They also answered six simple questions concerning intelligence and intelligence tests. There were various sex differences in self‐estimated IQ: males rated themselves higher on overall, mathematical, spatial, intrapersonal, spiritual, and naturalistic IQ compared with females. Multiple regressions indicated that verbal, logical, and intrapersonal intelligence were significant predictors for self and parents overall IQ estimations. Factor analysis of the 10, the 8, and the 7 self‐estimates scores did not confirm Gardner's classification of multiple intelligences. Males were more likely to believe in sex differences in intelligence than females. Results are discussed in terms of the growing literature in the self‐estimates of intelligence, as well as limitations of that approach.     

Following Young Students’ Understanding of Three Phenomena in which Transformations of Matter Occur

In order to develop successful teaching approaches to transformations of matter, we need to know more about how young students develop an understanding of these processes. In this longitudinal study, we followed 25 students from 7 to 13 years of age in their reasoning about transformations of matter. The questions addressed included how the students’ understanding of transformations of matter changed and how we can make sense of individual learning pathways. In interviews performed once or twice every year the students described and explained three situations: fading leaves left on the ground, a burning candle, and a glass of water covered with a glass plate on which some mist had formed. When analysing the interviews, we found a common pathway of how the students’ ideas changed over the years in each one of the situations. When analysing individual student’s interviews with Ausubel’s assimilation theory we could discern subordinate, superordinate and combinatorial learning. How these findings can contribute to an improvement of teaching about transformations of matter is discussed.     

Action protocol for the use of robotics in students with Autism Spectrum Disoders: A systematic-review

Education and Information Technologies - During the last two decades, the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has opened new paths in the intervention of people with Autism...