A capability approach to children's well-being,agency and participatory rights in education

This article applies a capability approach to examine how children's agency, well-being and participation rights can be developed and supported in educational settings. We introduce Amartya Sen's concepts of agency and well-being freedoms and achievements to highlight the tensions and trade-offs between risks to children's agency and well-being in and through educational processes. We draw upon selected empirical examples to illustrate this relationship further. By positioning the development of children's agency as an explicit and important goal of education, alongside well-being achievement, we aim to broaden the evaluative space for assessing what constitutes quality in children's education. We conclude with some reflections on implications for policy and practice going forward.     

A compressed self-index using a Ziv–Lempel dictionary

A compressed full-text self-index for a text T, of size u, is a data structure used to search for patterns P, of size m, in T, that requires reduced space, i.e. space that depends on the empirical entropy (H _k or H ₀) of T, and is, furthermore, able to reproduce any substring of T. In this paper we present a new compressed self-index able to locate the occurrences of P in O((m + occ)log u) time, where occ is the number of occurrences. The fundamental improvement over previous LZ78 based indexes is the reduction of the search time dependency on m from O(m ²) to O(m). To achieve this result we point out the main obstacle to linear time algorithms based on LZ78 data compression and expose and explore the nature of a recurrent structure in LZ-indexes, the suffix tree. We show that our method is very competitive in practice by comparing it against other state of the art compressed indexes.

Television fiction and online communities: an analysis of comments on social networks and forums made by female viewers

This article analyzes the feeling of communities of female social viewers who watch television fiction and participate in social networks and forums dedicated to the programs. The sample is made up of 7,849 comments from 157 platforms (49 Facebook pages, 71 Twitter accounts, and 37 forums). We describe the characteristics of these communities of fans, which differ significantly from cult fandoms and are based on ICT interweaving between reception and female viewers’ daily lives. The results reveal that these active online poster and lurker communities express themselves through their emotional ties with the television series, self-reflection, and the manifestation of intimacy. Identification with the group is based on the relationship of the storylines with their own lives, with no attempts at constructing a cultural or political identity.     

Cytocompatible cellulose nanofibers from invasive plant species Agave americana L. and Ricinus communis L.: a renewable green source of highly crystalline nanocellulose

In this study, the fibers of invasive species Agave americana L. and Ricinus communis L. were successfully used for the first time as new sources to produce cytocompatible and highly crystalline cellulose nanofibers. Cellulose nanofibers were obtained by two methods, based on either alkaline or acid hydrolysis. The morphology, chemical composition, and crystallinity of the obtained materials were characterized by scanning electron microscopy(SEM) together with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy(EDX), dynamic light scattering(DLS), X-ray diffraction(XRD), and Fourier transform infrared(FTIR)spectroscopy. The crystallinity indexes(CIs) of the cellulose nanofibers extracted from A. americana and R. communis were very high(94.1% and 92.7%, respectively). Biological studies evaluating the cytotoxic effects of the prepared cellulose nanofibers on human embryonic kidney 293 T(HEK293 T) cells were also performed. The nanofibers obtained using the two different extraction methods were all shown to be cytocompatible in the concentration range assayed(i.e., 0-500 μg/mL). Our results showed that the nanocellulose extracted from A. americana and R. communis fibers has high potential as a new renewable green source of highly crystalline cellulose-based cytocompatible nanomaterials for biomedical applications.     

The development of analogical reading in Spanish

The use and development of analogical processes in learning to read in Spanish are presented. In the first experiment, the results show that children of 6 years old show analogical effects in reading pseudowords and that the magnitude of this effect is the same as with 10 years old children. However, it is found that children of 10 years old make many lexicalizations when reading pseudowords (about 50% of the items). In experiment 2 this finding is further analyzed. The results show that 9 years old children make more lexicalizations than adult control subjects do. It is suggested that the development of analogical procedures is a fast process (6 years old children already have done it), but that the precise control of lexical information over perceptual one is a later process.     

The Use of Different Translation Devices to Analyze Knowledge-Building in a University Chemistry Classroom

Research in Science Education - This research draws on Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to understand the epistemic dimension of the higher education classroom discourse of a professor who is well...