Correction to: An application of importance-performance analysis to students’ evaluation of teaching

Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability -     

Agencing femininity: digital Mrs. Consumer in intra-action

ABSTRACT

Social media is abound with women writing about consumption goods and practices associated with femininity and heterosexual nuclear family life, such as being married, dressing, cooking and home decoration. This article examines how the housewife ideal can be an attractive identity in the 2010s and, drawing on the post-humanist performativity by Karen Barad (2007), it maps the material-discursive agencies that enable the re-emergence of this figure. Building on in-depth interviews with women who refer to themselves as influencers and bloggers, and visual and textual analyses of their Instagram-accounts, including links to sponsors and comments from followers, the article analyzes how the tensions between these women's real lives and their cyber lives, become meaningful in this technological culture. The breaking of boundaries between human and non-human resulting from digital technology has re-configured the housewife role by transforming boundaries between intimate and commercial practices. By focusing on the three areas: Transforming the feminine body, Transforming Intimacy, and Entrepreneurial femininity the article shows how agency emerges from within transforming practices of body, intimacy and entrepreneurship, intra-acting within this new housewife phenomenon. In doing so it discusses the negotiations and space for agency these women thought that digital technologies provided for them.     

Fostering online learning at the workplace: A scheme to identify and analyse collaboration processes in asynchronous discussions

Research has shown that providing participants with high-quality learning material is not sufficient to help them profit most from online education. The level of interaction among participants is another key determinant for learning outcomes. However, merely proposing interaction does not automatically lead to fruitful discussion and collaboration. Specifically, social presence and facilitation activities add value to online discussions. In Murphy's collaboration framework, social presence represents the basis of successful online collaboration from which more reflective discussions and co-construction can evolve. In this paper, an adjusted version of this framework was applied in a workplace learning context. The content analysis of 1170 comments in an online course for careers practitioners of a public employment service showed that the extended framework generated deeper insights into the dynamics of online discussions. The results show that involvement in collaborative learning at the workplace was supported by a high social presence and influenced by course topic and tasks. Facilitation played an important role in creating a sympathetic sense of community and stimulating co-creation processes.     

What Underlies the False Consensus Effect? How Personal Opinion and Disagreement Affect Perception of Public Opinion

This study draws on a sample of participants in online groupsto analyze the interaction between individual-level and communicative-levelfactors that affect public opinion perception. We first assessthe association between individual views on several issues—thedeath penalty, gun regulation and teaching morality in publicschools—and false consensus, i.e., the tendency to attributeown views to others. We also examine whether the associationbetween individual opinion and false consensus is mitigatedby perceived disagreement with offline discussion networks andwith participants in online discussion groups. As expected,not only is there a correlation between personal and perceivedopinion, but also those who strongly favor the three policiesestimate public support to be higher than do those who are unfavorableor moderate. Multivariate models further show that encounteringdisagreement, online or offline, attenuates the associationbetween the individual opinion and false consensus. Theoreticaland practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Improving CFD prediction of drag on Paralympic tandem athletes: influence of grid resolution and turbulence model

Tandem cycling enables visually impaired athletes to compete in cycling in the Paralympics. Tandem aerodynamics can be analysed by track measurements, wind-tunnel experiments and numerical simulations with computational fluid dynamics (CFD). However, the proximity of the pilot (front) and the stoker (rear) and the associated strong aerodynamic interactions between both athletes present substantial challenges for CFD simulations, the results of which can be very sensitive to computational parameters such as grid topology and turbulence model. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first CFD and wind-tunnel investigation on tandem cycling aerodynamics. The study analyses the influence of the CFD grid topology and the turbulence model on the aerodynamic forces on pilot and stoker and compares the results with wind-tunnel measurements. It is shown that certain combinations of grid topology and turbulence model give trends that are opposite to those shown by other combinations. Indeed, some combinations provide counter-intuitive drag outcomes with the stoker experiencing a drag force up to 28% greater than the pilot. Furthermore, the application of a blockage correction for two athlete bodies in close proximity is investigated. Based on a large number of CFD simulations and validation with wind-tunnel measurements, this paper provides guidelines for the accurate CFD simulation of tandem aerodynamics.     

Science Diplomacy Policy Processes in Comparative Perspective: The Use of Scientific Cooperation Agreements in Canada,India, Norway,and the UK

There is growing attention to science diplomacy among scholars, policymakers, and scientific associations around the world. However, there continues to be contestation around the concept of science diplomacy, currently framed alternately as a new understanding of diplomacy, part of the global challenges discourse, central to the internationalization of science, and typifying competitive innovation. This contestation is furthered by the involvement of a broad array of policy instruments and actors in science diplomacy. In response, this paper focuses on a single policy instrument, examining eight bilateral and multilateral scientific cooperation agreements led by Canada, India, Norway, and the United Kingdom. Kingdon’s multiple streams framework is employed to explain how the interplay between policy actors, the policy agenda, policy problems, and policy alternatives leads to the creation of science diplomacy policies. Across the cases, all of the current science diplomacy discourses were applicable, holding stronger explanatory power in the problem and policy streams of the policy process while not obviously matching processes seen in the political stream. The findings also identified a gap in the current framing in understanding how geopolitical dynamics impact the creation of science diplomacy policies and how different policy actors negotiate, exploit, or are subject to these forces. By stabilizing one element of the ongoing debates around science diplomacy, the paper contributes a deeper examination of the array of policy actors and their involvement in different stages of the policy process leading to the formation of scientific cooperation agreements as tools of science diplomacy.

     

A high-efficiency and versatile CRISPR/Cas9-mediated HDR-based biallelic editing system

Clustered regulatory interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated protein 9 nuclease (Cas9), the third-generation genome editing tool, has been favored because of its high efficiency and clear system composition. In this technology, the introduced double-strand breaks (DSBs) are mainly repaired by non-homologous end joining (NHEJ) or homology-directed repair (HDR) pathways. The high-fidelity HDR pathway is used for genome modification, which can introduce artificially controllable insertions, deletions, or substitutions carried by the donor templates. Although high-level knock-out can be easily achieved by NHEJ, accurate HDR-mediated knock-in remains a technical challenge. In most circumstances, although both alleles are broken by endonucleases, only one can be repaired by HDR, and the other one is usually recombined by NHEJ. For gene function studies or disease model establishment, biallelic editing to generate homozygous cell lines and homozygotes is needed to ensure consistent phenotypes. Thus, there is an urgent need for an efficient biallelic editing system. Here, we developed three pairs of integrated selection systems, where each of the two selection cassettes contained one drug-screening gene and one fluorescent marker. Flanked by homologous arms containing the mutated sequences, the selection cassettes were integrated into the target site, mediated by CRISPR/Cas9-induced HDR. Positively targeted cell clones were massively enriched by fluorescent microscopy after screening for drug resistance. We tested this novel method on the amyloid precursor protein (APP) and presenilin 1 (PSEN1) loci and demonstrated up to 82.0% biallelic editing efficiency after optimization. Our results indicate that this strategy can provide a new efficient approach for biallelic editing and lay a foundation for establishment of an easier and more efficient disease model.