Introduction to the Special Forum on Critical Making as Research Program

This special issue spotlights the growing diversity of critical making practices in a range of disciplinary contexts both inside and outside of the academy, and begins to develop perspectives that will foster the emergence of critical making as a coherent field. On one hand, we see great value in incorporating material practices into existing information systems (IS) and science and technology studies (STS) research programs. In particular, forms of material engagement can help overcome the ineffectual linguistic bias of traditional critiques of technoscience. On the other hand, we believe that current material practices can benefit from the conceptualization of knowledge and social organization that are foundational to IS and STS research. In this introduction to the special issue we call attention to the mechanisms by which such practices may combine representational and material work to foster and support the development of new knowledge-making communities and institutions. We believe such work can serve as a framework for others engaged in critical making practices to better contextualize and expand the relevance of their work. We intend this special issue to serve as a “stake in the ground” for research on new forms of material-conceptual critique and their incorporation in the repertoire of critical technoscience scholarship.     

Lockbox: mobility,privacy and values in cloud storage

This paper examines one particular problem of values in cloud computing: how individuals can take advantage of the cloud to store data without compromising their privacy and autonomy. Through the creation of Lockbox, an encrypted cloud storage application, we explore how designers can use reflection in designing for human values to maintain both privacy and usability in the cloud.     

Teaching Prospect Theory with the Deal or No Deal Game Show

Recent evidence indicates that decision makers are more sensitive to potential losses than gains. Loss aversion psychology has led behavioural economists to look beyond expected utility by developing prospect theory. We demonstrate this theory using the Deal or No Deal game show.     

网格技术:改进数据访问的性能

<正>谈起网格,肯定要涉及数据、信息以及如何在分布式的基础设施上对二者进行智能化处理。而这个时候似乎更让大家着迷的是网格的计算能力,而数据在以计算为重点的网格中仅能占据次席。这是为什么呢?通常,我们从媒体对网格计算方面的报道就可以看出。例     

Students’ writing ‘in transition’ from A-levels to university: how assessment drives students’ understandings,practices and discourses

The lament that ‘students can’t write’ remains loud and defiant, even after years of research pointing to the myriad factors that make students’ writing challenging, particularly when they move into university. This paper reports on a longitudinal, ethnographic study which explored students’ writing ‘in transition’, from A-levels to university in the UK, through the critical lens offered by the academic literacies conceptual framing. This paper offers critical analysis of the ways that students, teachers and institutions position writing at A-level and university, exploring the assumptions and beliefs that underpin their understandings and practices using Ivani?’s framework of discourses of writing. The analysis proposes that the centrality of assessment in the treatment of language at both levels creates an ‘assessment discourse of writing’, which originates in school, and becomes a defining and restrictive frame for students’ writing as they move into higher education. The analysis further suggests that assessment is the principal cause for the students’ challenges with adapting to the writing requirements of university. Moreover, assessment is used as a metalanguage for discussing writing at A-levels, and can become an unhelpful ‘anchor of continuance’ for students as they move into university.     

Emotion discourse, social cognition, and social skills in children with and without developmental delays

This study examined parent-child emotion discourse, children's independent social information processing, and social skills outcomes in 146 families of 8-year-olds with and without developmental delays. Children's emergent social-cognitive understanding (internal state understanding, perspective taking, and causal reasoning and problem solving) was coded in the context of parent-child conversations about emotion, and children were interviewed separately to assess social problem solving. Mothers, fathers, and teachers reported on children's social skills. The proposed strengths-based model partially accounted for social skills differences between typically developing children and children with delays. A multigroup analysis of the model linking emotion discourse to social skills through children's prosocial problem solving suggested that processes operated similarly for the two groups. Implications for ecologically focused prevention and intervention are discussed.     

Economic returns to education: What We Know, What We Don’t Know, and Where We Are Going—Some brief pointers

The estimation of the economic return to education has perhaps been one of the predominant areas of analysis in applied economics for over 50 years. In this short note we consider some of the recent directions taken by the literature, and also some of the blockages faced by both science and policymakers in pushing forward some key issues. This serves by way of introduction to a set of papers for a special issue of the Economics of Education Review.     

The European university landscape: A micro characterization based on evidence from the Aquameth project

This paper provides a new and systematic characterization of 488 universities, from 11 European countries: Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and UK. Using micro indicators built on the integrated Aquameth database, we characterize the European university landscape according to the following dimensions: history/foundation of university, dynamics of growth, specialization pattern, subject mix, funding composition, offer profile and productivity.     

Separation and enrichment of sodium-motile bacteria using cost-effective microfluidics

Many motile bacteria are propelled by the rotation of flagellar filaments. This rotation is driven by a membrane protein known as the stator-complex, which drives the rotor of the bacterial flagellar motor. Torque generation is powered in most cases by proton transit through membrane protein complexes known as stators, with the next most common ionic power source being sodium. Sodium-powered stators can be studied through the use of synthetic chimeric stators that combine parts of sodium- and proton-powered stator proteins. The most well studied example is the use of the sodium-powered PomA-PotB chimeric stator unit in the naturally proton-powered Escherichia coli. Here we designed a fluidics system at low cost for rapid prototyping to separate motile and non-motile populations of bacteria while varying the ionic composition of the media and thus the sodium-motive force available to drive this chimeric flagellar motor. We measured separation efficiencies at varying ionic concentrations and confirmed using fluorescence that our device delivered eightfold enrichment of the motile proportion of a mixed population. Furthermore, our results showed that we could select bacteria from reservoirs where sodium was not initially present. Overall, this technique can be used to implement the selection of highly motile fractions from mixed liquid cultures, with applications in directed evolution to investigate the adaptation of motility in bacterial ecosystems.