Superstar inventors—Towards a people-centric perspective on the geography of technological renewal in the multinational corporation

This paper develops a people-centric perspective on the geographical dispersion of technological renewal in the multinational corporation (MNC). We contend that a large proportion of all foreign technological advancements can be attributed to a handful of individual inventors, suggesting a blockbuster effect of subsidiary technological development. This suggests that analyses carried out at the subsidiary or firm level disguise significant yet largely unexplored variation in the technological contributions made by individual members of these foreign units. To support this proposition, the paper draws upon an original data set that comprises all of the advanced foreign subsidiaries of 21 Swedish MNCs between 1893 and 2008, and follows their patenting activity in order to document the distribution of inventive activity, both across and within individual subsidiaries. The findings at the subsidiary level show that the distribution of technological activity and contribution to the overall multinational group is significantly skewed; the paper then empirically explores the assumption that a similar distribution also applies at the level of individual inventors. The results point to a pattern whereby most inventors make only occasional and limited technological contributions and, instead, more significant numbers of new technological discoveries are attributable to a select group of exceptionally inventive individuals. In the light of the results, we suggest the fruitfulness of applying a people-centric perspective on the sources of sustained competitive advantage of the MNC, the management of geographically dispersed capabilities in the multinational network, and the geographical sources of technological renewal in the MNC.     

Education for internationalism at the Nordic school for adult education in Geneva 1931–1939

Internationalism in the interwar era carried different meaning for different groups. A Nordic school for adult education, with the aim of raising the ‘international citizenship proficiency’ of the Nordic peoples, was established in Geneva in 1931, through cooperation between representatives of international organisations and adult educationists. Both groups harboured an intense passion for internationalism, but whereas the officials understood the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization to represent true internationalism, the educationists took a critical stance. Internationalism was for them related to nationalism and Nordism, and an expansion of the power of the small and neutral European states. This article examines the establishment of the Nordic school in the interwar period and analyses the ideological controversies surrounding its internationalism.     

Generating suggestions for queries in the long tail with an inverted index

This paper proposes an efficient and effective solution to the problem of choosing the queries to suggest to web search engine users in order to help them in rapidly satisfying their information needs. By exploiting a weak function for assessing the similarity between the current query and the knowledge base built from historical users’ sessions, we re-conduct the suggestion generation phase to the processing of a full-text query over an inverted index. The resulting query recommendation technique is very efficient and scalable, and is less affected by the data-sparsity problem than most state-of-the-art proposals. Thus, it is particularly effective in generating suggestions for rare queries occurring in the long tail of the query popularity distribution. The quality of suggestions generated is assessed by evaluating the effectiveness in forecasting the users’ behavior recorded in historical query logs, and on the basis of the results of a reproducible user study conducted on publicly-available, human-assessed data. The experimental evaluation conducted shows that our proposal remarkably outperforms two other state-of-the-art solutions, and that it can generate useful suggestions even for rare and never seen queries.     

Assessment of antinuclear antibodies (ANA): National recommendations on behalf of the Croatian society of medical biochemistry and laboratory medicine

Antinuclear antibodies (ANA) represent a family of autoantibodies targeting ubiquitous cellular constituents and are a hallmark of systemic inflammatory autoimmune rheumatic diseases named connective tissue diseases (CTD). The gold standard method for ANA determination is indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) on the human laryngeal epidermoid carcinoma cell line type 2 substrate (HEp-2), but with increasing demand for ANA testing, novel methods eased for automation emerged, which allows testing by staff less experienced in this specific field of laboratory diagnostic. In 2016 The working group (WG) for laboratory diagnostics of autoimmune diseases as part of the Committee for the Scientific Professional Development of the Croatian Society of Medical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine (CSMBLM) published the data of a survey regarding general practice in laboratory diagnostics of autoimmune diseases in Croatia. Results indicated high diversity in the performance of autoantibody testing as well as reporting of the results and indicated the need of creating recommendations for the assessment of ANA that would help harmonize diagnostics of systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases in Croatia. This document encompasses twenty-seven recommendations for ANA testing created concerning indications for ANA testing, preanalytical, analytical, and postanalytical issues, including rational algorithm and quality control assurance. These recommendations are based on the relevant international recommendations and guidelines for the assessment of ANA testing and relevant literature search and should help to harmonize the approach in ANA testing and clarify differences in interpretation of the results obtained using different methods of determination.     

The Internet Is Forever: Student Indiscretions Reveal the Need for Effective Social Media Policies in Academia

Students’ imprudent use of social media might threaten their employability and undermine their emerging professional identities. Most professions acknowledge that any benefits of social media must be balanced against its potential to negatively affect workers’ professional lives and the public trust. Professional bodies have developed social media guidelines as a part of more general professional codes of conduct to try to mitigate the legal, ethical, and social risks that imprudent social media use can pose to patients, clients, colleagues, and social media users themselves. This discussion considers examples of students’ social media use from health care and other tertiary programs in Australia and Sweden and concludes that universities must confront social media challenges as part of students’ educational experience for the development of a responsible and professional digital citizenry.     

Reconstructing Dominant Paradigms of Teacher Education: Possibilities for pedagogical transformation in Fiji

Many nation states on the periphery of the dominant socio‐economic sphere continue to work with variants of education models introduced by colonial players. This paper argues that whilst historical factors contributed to the development of an educational approach underpinned by a techno‐rational ideology in Fiji, the actual details of educational practice suggest a more complex scenario. The resonance of the debate this establishes is explored through a case study of teacher education in Fiji. The study finds that despite the dominance of a “routinised”, mechanistic practice that was seen to define local culture/s of teacher education, there are indications that imply a sense of “possibilities” and hope. However, dominant techno‐rational and personalistic cultures of practice need to be frameworked by a socially located paradigm that places the issue of transformation more visibly in its remit, and that works from the understandings and perceptions that educators have about their own practice.     

Developmental dyslexics show deficits in the processing of temporal auditory information in German vowel length discrimination

The present study investigated auditory temporal processing in developmental dyslexia by using a vowel length discrimination task. Both temporal and phonological processing were studied in a single experiment. Seven German vowel pairs differing in vowel height were used. The vowels of each pair differed only with respect to vowel length (e.g., /a/ vs. /a:/). In German, vowel length is characterized by temporal and spectral information. Three types of differences between long versus short vowels were varied: In the phonological condition, pairs of natural vowels were used, differing in their temporal as well as in their spectral content. In two temporal conditions, in contrast, a natural vowel was always combined with a manipulated one to keep spectral content of long and short vowels identical. Thus, the only distinguishing feature between the two vowels was temporal in nature. Vowels were embedded into monosyllabic pseudo-words and presented successively in a speeded same–different task. Twenty dyslexics and twenty age-matched controls participated in the experiment. In both groups, discrimination accuracy decreased with increasing vowel height in the two temporal conditions. This result is consistent with former findings on the relevance of temporal information for vowel length identification in German and extends this topic to cover discrimination demands. In the phonological condition, groups did not differ in discrimination accuracy. In both temporal conditions, however, dyslexics performed worse than controls. These results suggest that developmental dyslexia is associated with impairments in processing basic acoustic parameters of the speech signal, in particular, with a deficit in temporal processing.