School Schedules Affect Sleep Timing in Children and Contribute to Partial Sleep Deprivation

Although the environmental light/dark cycle is the main zeitgeber for the human species, the social cues seem to be important in the synchronization of circadian rhythms. In Brazil, the existence of two school schedules—one with only morning classes (MG) and other with only afternoon classes (AG)—allows the investigation of the effect of school activities on light exposure and sleep/wake patterns in children. Forty‐seven children wore wrist actimeters for a week for registration of light and sleep data. MG children presented shorter sleep duration on school days than the children from the AG. The results showed that during school days MG children were exposed to bright light earlier in the morning when compared to AG children. Nevertheless, there were no differences in light exposure after sunset. The results reflect the role of school schedules and artificial light in shaping light exposure, and its association with sleep timing in children.     

Design principles for creating digital transparency in government

Under pressure to fight corruption, hold public officials accountable, and build trust with citizens, many governments pursue the quest for greater transparency. They publish data about their internal operations, externalize decision-making processes, establish digital inquiry lines to public officials, and employ other forms of transparency using digital means. Despite the presence of many transparency-enhancing digital tools, putting such tools together to achieve the desired level of digital transparency, to design entire government systems for digital transparency, remains challenging. Design principles and other design guides are lacking in this area. This article aims to fill this gap. We identify a set of barriers to digital transparency in government, define 16 design principles to overcome such barriers, and evaluate these principles using three case studies from different countries. Some principles apply to projects, others to systems, yet others to entire organizations. To achieve digital transparency, before building and deploying digital solutions, government organizations should build technological and institutional foundations and use such foundations to organize themselves for transparency. The proposed design principles can help develop and apply such foundations.     

Providing knowledge recommendations: an approach for informal electronic mentoring

The use of Web 2.0 technologies for knowledge management is invading the corporate sphere. The Web 2.0 is the most adopted knowledge transfer tool within knowledge intensive firms and is starting to be used for mentoring. This paper presents IM-TAG, a Web 2.0 tool, based on semantic technologies, for informal mentoring. The tool offers recommendations of mentoring contents built upon personal competencies of the mentee, combined with content and opinion tagging. To validate the tool, a case study comparing recommendations from the IM-TAG and a group of experts was conducted. Results show that the accuracy of IM-TAG's recommendations is notable and satisfactory. The main conclusions of this research may be valuable to organizations immersed in mentoring programs.     

Web knowledge sharing and its effect on innovation: an empirical investigation in SMEs

This paper extends previous studies on knowledge management by analysing factors affecting Web Knowledge Sharing (WKS) in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In addition, the impact of WKS on organizational innovation and the moderating effect of IT skills on this relation are analysed. Grounded in the technology-organization-environment (TOE) theory and the resource-based view (RBV), this paper develops an integrative research model, which analyses these relations using structural equation modelling on a data set of 535 Spanish SMEs. Results suggest that technological and organizational factors – IT expertise and commitment-based human resources practices – positively influence WKS, while the contrary is found for environmental factors (customer power). In addition, results show that WKS contributes positively to organizational innovation, though support for the moderating effect of IT skills in this relation is not found. The main conclusions of this research can be valuable to SMEs that use or intend to use Internet technologies for knowledge management.     

Asymmetry of red blood cell motions in a microchannel with a diverging and converging bifurcation

In microcirculation, red blood cells (RBCs) flowing through bifurcations may deform considerably due to combination of different phenomena that happen at the micro-scale level, such as: attraction effect, high shear, and extensional stress, all of which may influence the rheological properties and flow behavior of blood. Thus, it is important to investigate in detail the behavior of blood flow occurring at both bifurcations and confluences. In the present paper, by using a micro-PTV system, we investigated the variations of velocity profiles of two working fluids flowing through diverging and converging bifurcations, human red blood cells suspended in dextran 40 with about 14% of hematocrit level (14 Hct) and pure water seeded with fluorescent trace particles. All the measurements were performed in the center plane of rectangular microchannels using a constant flow rate of about 3.0 × 10⁻¹² m³/s. Moreover, the experimental data was compared with numerical results obtained for Newtonian incompressible fluid. The behavior of RBCs was asymmetric at the divergent and convergent side of the geometry, whereas the velocities of tracer particles suspended in pure water were symmetric and well described by numerical simulation. The formation of a red cell-depleted zone immediately downstream of the apex of the converging bifurcation was observed and its effect on velocity profiles of RBCs flow has been investigated. Conversely, a cell-depleted region was not formed around the apex of the diverging bifurcation and as a result the adhesion of RBCs to the wall surface was enhanced in this region.     

A Review of the Brazilian Book Market

Brazil is a huge country with at least 100 million readers with a total population of 200 million. Is this a good number for you? The article describes the developments of the Brazilian book market and publishing industry. Sales in 2009 were an estimated $2.5 billion for more than 228 million copies of books sold. But a country this big, as it is almost 50% of entire South America, confronts several major challenges including a real lack of bookstores. But one of the channels that is growing every year are the door-to-door sales, it has grown from 5% of all sales in 2006 to 17% in 2009. In a country this big, the digital or eBooks may also be a very good strategy to get to more readers, but it is still a small market in Brazil. The interesting news is that publishers are working on it and looking for solutions and ways to act on this new area of digital and online publishing.     

Teaching of Energy Issues: A Debate Proposal for a Global Reorientation

The growing awareness of serious difficulties in the learning of energy issues has produced a great deal of research, most of which is focused on specific conceptual aspects. In our opinion, the difficulties pointed out in the literature are interrelated and connected to other aspects (conceptual as well as procedural and axiological), which are not sufficiently taken into account in previous research. This paper aims to carry out a global analysis in order to avoid the more limited approaches that deal only with individual aspects. From this global analysis we have outlined 24 propositions that are put forward for debate to lay the foundations for a profound reorientation of the teaching of energy topics in upper high school courses, in order to facilitate a better scientific understanding of these topics, avoid many students’ misconceptions and enhance awareness of the current situation of planetary emergency. This paper has been conceived as a contribution to the Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, established by the UN General Assembly for the period 2005–2014.     

Talking About Teaching Episodes

This paper examines two types of discourse in which teachers engage when discussing case studies based on classroom episodes, and the ways in which the availability of video data of these episodes may motivate a shift in the mode of discourse used. We interviewed two pairs of secondary school mathematics teachers after they had read a case study based on a 16-minute mathematics classroom episode taped in a secondary school in the United States. During each interview, a multimedia version of the case study, including video of the original episode, was available to the participants. We identify two modes of discourse engaged in by the teachers during the interviews: Grounded Narrative and Evaluative Discourse. We examine and identify the characteristics of the two discourse forms, drawn from both video and textual analysis. These characteristics are self-reflective talk, perspective, ethics, and linguistic patterns. The identification of two modes of discourse is relevant for researchers and teacher educators using case studies or video recordings. In addition, the findings provide insight into how teachers are “seeing” classroom events in a video case study.     

Ethnic Identity Development and Acculturation Preferences Among Minority and Majority Youth: Norms and Contact

This article tests a longitudinal model of the antecedents and consequences of changes in identification with indigenous (Mapuche) among indigenous and nonindigenous youth in Chilean school contexts over a 6‐month period (633 nonindigenous and 270 Mapuche students, M_ages = 12.47 and 12.80 years, respectively). Results revealed that in‐group norms supporting contact and quality of intergroup contact at Time 1 predicted student's changes in Mapuche identification at Time 2, which in turn predicted changes in support for adoption of Chilean culture and maintenance of Mapuche culture at Time 2; some of the relationships between these variables were found to be moderated by age and ethnicity. Conceptual and policy implications are addressed in the Discussion .