A complex web of education policy borrowing and transfer: Education for All and the Plan for the Development of Education in Brazil

This article analyses how Education for All policies were transferred to Brazil and Latin America by means of ambitious educational strategic plans such as the Plan for the Development of Education and the National Education Plans – promoted by the Federal Government of Brazil, and the Latin American Educational Goals – promoted by the Organisation of Ibero American States (i.e. the international commonwealth of countries which belonged to the old Hispanic and Portuguese empires). The analysis highlights how a complex web of educational policy transfer and borrowing was fashioned by means of concatenate environmental, cognitive and relational mechanisms.     

Authorship in multi-disciplinary,multi-national North-South research projects: issues of equity,capacity and accountability

The challenges of ensuring equity among partners of very different academic power and status, across continents, within complex research projects involving differing disciplines with their own norms, and balancing needs for capacity development of individuals and for institutions can be major sources of conflicts. While each of these concerns has been addressed separately, the implications of situations where they reinforce each other have not. Drawing on experience in four complex, multi-partner and multi-disciplinary social science research projects, I consider four main overlapping issues: (1) the structural inequalities inherent in North-South relationships as well as between junior and senior researchers and how these raise difficult problems for research managers; (2) the implications of different kinds of local institutions, and of seeing authorship as a major feature of capacity building, even if no funding is allocated to the task within research grants; (3) the effects of multi-disciplinarity: how intellectual property is understood in different disciplinary settings as well as embodied in national or institutional rules, and the implications of these differences in the context of the pressures imposed by institutional review procedures, in particular the Research Excellence Framework in the UK; (4) the challenges to research managers of ensuring that transaction costs do not swamp the possibility of achieving real intellectual additionalities, and how to address the risk that the costs of collaboration outweigh the likely benefits.     

Analysis of muscular activity and dynamic response of the lower limb adding vibration to cycling

Vibration in cycling has been proved to have undesirable effects over health, comfort and performance of the rider. In this study, 15 participants performed eight 6-min sub-maximal pedalling exercises at a constant power output (150W) and pedalling cadence (80 RPM) being exposed to vibration at different frequencies (20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 Hz) or without vibration. Oxygen uptake (VO2), heart rate (HR), surface EMG activity of seven lower limb muscles (GMax, RF, BF, VM, GAS, SOL and TA) and 3-dimentional accelerations at ankle, knee and hip were measured during the exercises. To analyse the dynamic response, the influence of the pedalling movement was taken into account. The results show that there was not significant influence of vibrations on HR and VO2 during this pedalling exercise. However, muscular activity presents a significant increase with the presence of vibration that is influenced by the frequency, but this increase was very low (< 1%). Also, the dynamic response shows an influence of the frequency as well as an influence of the different parts of the pedalling cycle. Those results help to explain the effects of vibration on the human body and the influence of the rider/bike interaction in those effects.