Understanding the rise of e-participation in non-democracies: Domestic and international factors

While it has often been suggested that information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide an important means of increasing citizen participation (which is at the core of democratic government), few commentators have expected non-democracies to create online environments in which citizens can take an active part in political processes. In recent years, however, some non-democracies have begun to outperform countries with long-standing democratic traditions in terms of e-participation development. According to the 2010 United Nations (UN) e-government survey, Bahrain outranks France, Kazakhstan beats Sweden and Malaysia ranks higher than Germany. This article sets out to understand the recent rise of e-participation initiatives in non-democracies. Drawing on comparative longitudinal data from the UN e-government surveys, we tested the assertion that international drivers of change are competing with the dominant focus on domestic factors, especially in the non-democratic world, and are influencing the patterns of reform. The empirical analysis demonstrated important differences between the drivers of change in democratic and non-democratic countries and found economic globalization to be the strongest predictor of e-participation initiatives in non-democratic countries. In conclusion, we argue that economic globalization alters the context of e-participation and necessitates a re-examination of many of its premises and tenets.     

Program II—Eight years after

As freshmen in 1966, 26 students at a liberal arts college entered Program II, and experiment in individualized education which relieved them from usual collegiate requirements for all four years. Twelve years later, 22 of these participants, plus 19 nonparticipating classmates of 1970, were interviewed. Except for their evaluation of their college experience (Program II participants were more negative about it), participants and nonparticipants are indistinguishable on comparisons of post-graduate education, occupational history, family and residential patterns, leisure activities, and attitudes toward self.This research was supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation.     

数字黑洞

本文分析了数字化项目的投资陷阱，从成本构成上阐述了容易被人忽视的持续性投入，提醒人们，如果预算中无法保障维护性费用的话，先期进行数字化的高昂投入也将前功尽弃。     

The use of language in understanding subject matter

Empirical results show that frequently the meaning of expressions used by students in expressing their understanding of subject matter does not correspond to the meaning of those expressions in the subject matter theory that the students are expected to learn. There is also often a lack of identity of meaning between the same students’ use of the same expression from one use of the expression to another, in very similar contexts. The context gives a specific meaning to any expression. This variation in context and meaning is very central to the phenomena of teaching and learning. In educational research there is a need to differentiate between specific meanings expressed in conceptualizing subject matter, on the one hand, and concepts and meanings seen as parts of cognitive systems and social languages, on the other. The contextual character of the use of language is crucial to the understanding of teaching and learning and needs to be more carefully considered. The article is a discussion of the problem of varying meanings of language expressions in relation to major traditions of research, focusing on meanings and concepts within the field of learning and teaching.     

Automatic item generation of probability word problems

Mathematical word problems represent a common item format for assessing student competencies. Automatic item generation (AIG) is an effective way of constructing many items with predictable difficulties, based on a set of predefined task parameters. The current study presents a framework for the automatic generation of probability word problems based on templates that allow for the generation of word problems involving different topics from probability theory. It was tested in a pilot study with N = 146 German university students. The items show a good fit to the Rasch model. Item difficulties can be explained by the Linear Logistic Test Model (LLTM) and by the random-effects LLTM. The practical implications of these findings for future test development in the assessment of probability competencies are also discussed.     

Using matrix norms to estimate the direction of arrival of planar waves on an ULA

SEAD method estimates the direction-of-arrival angles on an uniform linear array based on the difference between the two largest singular values, what is called differential spectrum. Although it presented an outstanding performance, the ability to indicate the source positions was not elucidated yet. Inspired by the differential spectrum formulation we derived a total differential spectrum and found out that the matrix norm induced by the vector 2-norm of a modified spatial covariance matrix can be used to estimate the direction-of-arrival of multiple plane waves. Indeed we show that matrix norms are estimators and we propose their use instead of the singular value decomposition in SEAD-based methods. We present a general mathematical expression in order to explicit the operating principles of the proposed methods. Consequently, we were able to explain how the relation between the arriving and the search angles produces the larger peaks on the differential spectrum. To evaluate the important role played by matrix norms, a thousand experiments were carried out. They showed that the proposed approach proved to be as accurate as the previous SEAD-based methods, while providing a significant reduction on runtime. It also outperformed well-established methods like MODEX regarding the estimation error.     

Neue Schulaufsichts- und Schulleitungsformen in Schweden (das Schulgesetz Vom 1. Juli 1958)

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Predicting research excellence at the individual level: The importance of publication rate,top journal publications,and top 10% publications in the case of early career mathematicians

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between publication rate, top journal publications and excellence during the first eight years of the career, and how well publication rate, top journal publications and highly cited publications during the first four years of the career can predict whether an author attain excellence in the fifth to the eighth year. The dataset consisted of publication track records of 406 early career mathematicians in the sub-field of number theory collected from the MathSciNet database. Logistic regression and dominance analysis was applied to the data. The major conclusions were (1) publication rate had a positive effect on excellence during the first eighth years of the career. However, those who publish many articles in top journals, which implicitly require a high publication count, had an even higher probability of attaining excellence. These results suggest that publishing in top journals is very important in the process of attaining excellence in the early career in addition to publishing many papers; and (2) a dominance analysis indicated that the number of top journal publications and highly cited publications during the first four years of the career were the most important predictors of who will attain excellence in the later career. The results are discussed in relation to indicator development and science policy.