Meritocracy in Singapore

Abstract

This article considers the role of meritocracy in the ruling ideology of Singapore. It argues that meritocracy, far from being a system for the management of scarce resources, is in fact the imposition of scarcity. It uses the example of the university in Singapore as the prime site for the production of meritocratic ideology and considers the consequences of meritocratic higher education as it articulates with meritocracy more generally in the Singapore polity.     

Development of a scale of Sense of Community in university online courses

Creating a sense of community in online classes contributes to student retention and to their overall satisfaction with the course itself. This study aimed to develop a scale of sense of community of students attending online university courses. A series of ordinal exploratory factor analyses were conducted on data obtained from 839 students enrolled in Italian universities. Using an item analysis method, we were able to select the 36 most valid items from an original set of 60 items we had previously defined. These items are distributed across three related factors measuring membership, influence, and fulfillment of needs. This factorial structure replicates the McMillan and Chavis’s model of sense of community, upon the basis of which this scale was developed. The three factors presented good ordinal alpha and adequate convergent/divergent validity coefficients. The scale represents an efficient tool for the design, monitoring, and evaluation of online courses.     

Computers With Wings: Flight Simulation and Personalized Landscapes

We propose, as a special way to explore the physics of flying objects, to use a flight simulator with a personalized scenery to reproduce the territory where students live. This approach increases the participation and attention of students to physics classes but also creates several opportunities for addressing side activities and arguments of various nature, from history to geography, computer science, and much more.     

Challenges and prospects for Indian education in Mexico

Author of several books and articles on the ethnic question in Peru and Mexico, and on indigenous education.     

Climate and litter C/N ratio constrain soil organic carbon accumulation

Soil organic carbon (SOC) plays critical roles in stabilizing atmospheric CO₂ concentration, but the mechanistic controls on the amount and distribution of SOC on global scales are not well understood. In turn, this has hampered the ability to model global C budgets and to find measures to mitigate climate change. Here, based on the data from a large field survey campaign with 2600 plots across China''s forest ecosystems and a global collection of published data from forested land, we find that a low litter carbon-to-nitrogen ratio (C/N) and high wetness index (P/PET, precipitation-to-potential-evapotranspiration ratio) are the two factors that promote SOC accumulation, with only minor contributions of litter quantity and soil texture. The field survey data demonstrated that high plant diversity decreased litter C/N and thus indirectly promoted SOC accumulation by increasing the litter quality. We conclude that any changes in plant-community composition, plant-species richness and environmental factors that can reduce the litter C/N ratio, or climatic changes that increase wetness index, may promote SOC accumulation. The study provides a guideline for modeling the carbon cycle of various ecosystem scales and formulates the principle for land-based actions for mitigating the rising atmospheric CO₂ concentration.     

The effects of two different correction strategies on the snatch technique in weightlifting

Improving motor skills represents one of the major issues in motor control and motor learning literature. The aim of this study was to investigate which of two strategies, method of amplification of error (MAE) or direct instruction (DI), would be more beneficial for error correction of the snatch technique. Thirty well-trained male weightlifters were randomly assigned to one of three training conditions (MAE, DI and Control). The experiment took place in only one practice session in which each lifter performed 3 pretraining trials, 8 training intervention trials, and 3 post-training trials, and a retention test session after 1 week. An optoelectronic motion capture system was used to measure the kinematic parameters of the weightlifting performance. After the training intervention, data showed that the MAE group revealed a greater improvement in several kinematic parameters when compared to the DI and Control groups, and the benefits derived from its application were still present 1 week later in the retention test. Nevertheless, the findings of the present study should be interpreted with caution due to the relatively small sample size; further research will also be necessary to evaluate the effects of MAE with different ability levels and other sport skills. The present findings could have practical implications for sport psychology and physical education because while practice is obviously necessary for improving learning, the efficacy of the learning process is essential in enhancing learners’ motivation and sport enjoyment.     

Tracing the links between science and technology: An exploratory analysis of scientists’ and inventors’ networks

The paper provides an exploratory analysis of the research networks linking scientists working in an open science environment, and researchers involved in the private technology domain. The study combines data on scientific co-authorship with data on patent co-invention, at the level of individual researchers, for three science-intensive technology fields, i.e. lasers, semiconductors and biotechnology, in order to assess the extent of the overlap between the two communities and to identify the role of key individuals in the process of knowledge transfer. Our findings reveal that the extent of the connectedness among scientists and inventors is rather large, and that particular individuals, i.e. authors-inventors, who act as gatekeepers and bridge the boundaries between the two domains, are fundamental to ensuring this connectivity. These individuals tend to occupy prominent positions in the scientific and the technological networks. However, our results also show maintaining a very central position in the scientific network may come at the expense of being able to fill a similarly central position in a technological network (and vice versa). Finally, preliminary analysis of the institutional origins of authors-inventors shows that one characteristic, distinctive of Europe compared to the United States, is associated with the relatively lower involvement of corporate scientists at the intersection between the two worlds of science and technology.     

An optical counting technique with vertical hydrodynamic focusing for biological cells

A barrier in scaling laboratory processes into automated microfluidic devices has been the transfer of laboratory based assays: Where engineering meets biological protocol. One basic requirement is to reliably and accurately know the distribution and number of biological cells being dispensed. In this study, a novel optical counting technique to efficiently quantify the number of cells flowing into a microtube is presented. REH, B-lymphoid precursor leukemia, are stained with a fluorescent dye and frames of moving cells are recorded using a charge coupled device (CCD) camera. The basic principle is to calculate the total fluorescence intensity of the image and to divide it by the average intensity of a single cell. This method allows counting the number of cells with an uncertainty ±5%, which compares favorably to the standard biological methodology, based on the manual Trypan Blue assay, which is destructive to the cells and presents an uncertainty in the order of 20%. The use of a microdevice for vertical hydrodynamic focusing, which can reduce the background noise of out of focus cells by concentrating the cells in a thin layer, has further improved the technique. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation and confocal laser scanning microscopy images have shown an 82% reduction in the vertical displacement of the cells. For the flow rates imposed during this study, a throughput of 100–200 cells∕s is achieved.