Madrasa education in South Asia and Southeast Asia: current issues and debates

Madaris (plural of madrasa) face a multitude of challenges in preparing students for life in rapidly modernising societies and emerging globalised knowledge economies. The complexity of the role and tasks of madaris, which are caught in the interface of modernity and tradition, the challenges they face, and the strategies they develop to address these challenges, suggest the need for a very cautious approach when attaining a clear picture of madrasa education and making conclusive statements about them. The literature has contributed more to confusion than clarity about the number of madaris, their rationale, purpose, pedagogy, curricula, funding, administration, relations with the state, and global violence. This paper presents an account of current debates of madrasa education and reform focusing on madaris within the diverse Sunni schools of thought and denominations located across South Asia and Southeast Asia. Based on an extensive review and analysis of over 90 articles, an overview of madrasa education and an examination of the issues and challenges facing Islamic schools that struggle to uphold tradition, and those that have begun to embrace modernisation and integration in the global process of change is given. The extent that some Islamic education systems are willing to collaborate with non-Muslims and in the process potentially enrich their circle of interest while engaging with the rest of the world in dialogue offers promising glimpses and a sense of hope for religious-based education in Muslim communities in the 21st century.     

Gender and online health information: a partitioned technology assessment

Objective: To examine the extent to which health information seeking behaviors vary across genders or are differentially associated with access to computers, the Internet, and online health information. Research design: Stratified survey, data analysis. Methods: Using binary logistic regression we examine information seeking differences between demographic groups. Questions addressed include: 1) Are any identified groups significantly underserved regarding access to computers, access to the Internet, and preferences for seeking online health information, and 2) have differences between gender groups in access to computers, Internet services and online health information narrowed, remained constant, or widened over recent years, following recent national initiatives to narrow the technology gap for underserved populations? Outcomes: Information seeking variation across gender groups and between technologies was at times significant. There was little difference in the access to computer between females and males. In 2002, 75.4% and 73.1% of female and male participants reported that they occasionally use computers, respectively. In 2000, the respective figures were 72.4% and 72.7%. The rates of use of Internet services among computer users, however, were quite different between female and male (P_{at 2002}= 0.0002 and P_{at 2000}= 0.0082) and the disparity in 2000 (OR = 0.7366 [0.5870, 0.9243]) increased in 2002 (OR = 0.5675 [0.4222, 0.7627]). The odds ratios (OR) indicate that females were 0.7366 and 0.5675 times less likely to use computers than male counterparts in 2000 and 2002, respectively. Conclusion: Recent technology initiatives in the US aimed at reducing disparities in access to online resources appear to have had little effect in facilitating equal access to web‐based health information.     

Crowdsourcing civility: A natural experiment examining the effects of distributed moderation in online forums

Participation in discussions about the public interest can be enhanced by technology, but can also create an environment in which participants are overwhelmed by the quantity, quality, and diversity of information and arguments. Political participation is at a greater disadvantage than non-political activities in that participants from different parties already start out with established differences, which requires them to reach some form of common ground before progress can be made. Those seeking authentic deliberation are discouraged to participate when confronted with uncivil and inflammatory rhetoric. These issues are often exacerbated in online discussions, where lack of identity cues and low barriers to entry can lead to heightened incivility between participants, often labeled as “flaming” and “trolling”. This paper explores the extent to which moderator systems, tools online discussion forums use to manage contributions, can reduce information overload and encourage civil conversations in virtual discussion spaces. Using the popular website Slashdot as an example of sound moderation in a public discourse setting, we found that users move toward consensus about which and how comments deserve to be moderated. Using these findings, we explore how transferable these systems are for participation in public matters specifically to the unique attributes of political discussion. Slashdot's political forum provides a comparison group that allowed us to find quantitative and qualitative differences in political posting, comments, and moderation. Our results show that large scale, civil participation is possible with a distributed moderation system that enables regularly lively debates to be conducted positively because the system provides tools for people to enforce norms of civility.     

Information networks and social media use in public diplomacy: a comparative analysis of South Korea and Japan

This article examines how South Korean and Japanese public diplomacy organizations employ digital media to embrace the principle of ‘networked public diplomacy’ through analyses of the web and social media practices. A network analysis was used to map interorganizational information networks among core public diplomacy organizations in each country. To reveal the key organizations' communication strategies on Facebook, a content analysis was also conducted. The findings indicate that Japan had a strong internal network infrastructure achieved through dispersed connections and partnerships; however, Korea had a centralized network, including a limited number of dominant actors. The results of content analysis suggest that both South Korea and Japanese public diplomats focused on promoting their cultural products and national values through their use of texts and visual images. In addition, user profile analysis gaged the degree of users' engagement in the organizations' profiles and identified the demographic features of users. Comparative data suggest the Korean public diplomacy organization was more successful at attracting and engaging with foreign public than the Japanese public diplomacy organization. These results imply that although these two countries had similar sociopolitical backgrounds and perspectives of public diplomacy, they had distinct forms of internal information networks, communication strategies, and social networking performances with public.     

Adaptive synchronization for a class of faulty and sampling coupled networks with its circuit implement

This paper is concerned with the asymptotic synchronization problem of a class of nonlinear complex networks with faulty and sampling couplings. A new version of the adaptive control strategy is proposed to adjust control parameters to compensate for the adverse impact of network attenuation faults, nonlinearities and sampling errors. Based on the adaptive adjustment laws, an approach that is application of knowledge of electricity is introduced to physically realize the adaptive controllers. Using Lyapunov stability theory for the synchronization error system, asymptotic synchronization of the overall networks can be established for the nonlinearly sampling and faulty couplings. Finally, the proposed adaptive control schemes are tested by simulation on Chua?s circuit network.     

Positions and rewards: The allocation of resources within a science-based entrepreneurial firm

We study the link between resource allocation and employee publication in the open science in a quantitative case study of one science-based, entrepreneurial firm. We bridge the literature on incentives with that on authority structures to argue that a positive relationship between rewards and productivity will be strongest for individuals in positions of scientific leadership within the firm. In a novel dataset, we find that prolific publishers receive greater year-end bonuses and are allocated additional direct reports, but this relationship only holds for individuals in scientific leadership roles. These results contribute to our understanding of resource allocation processes and reward structures in science-based firms.     

Gambling with Nonsense: Play and the Secondary English Classroom

Dominant and common-sense contemporary conceptions of practice tend to frame the emotional volatility of the classroom – most commonly explored in discussions about student behaviour – as a fundamental obstacle to teaching and learning. The ‘outstanding’ classroom is both orderly and, paradoxically perhaps, characterised by its passionate, and vocal, student engagement. In this piece I draw on D.W. Winnicott’s writing about play and aggression, exploring his ideas in the context of my work with two classes as a secondary English teacher at an inner-city comprehensive; doing so, I attempt to reframe both my own and my students’ affectively charged experience of the classroom as valuable rather than problematic. I posit certain moments of playfulness as a kind of pedagogical patience: less an evasion of, or a disruption to, the business of the curriculum, and more a route to meaningful engagement with it.     

Global output feedback tracking control for switched nonlinear systems with deferred prescribed performance

In this paper, the global output feedback tracking control is investigated for a class of switched nonlinear systems with time-varying system fault and deferred prescribed performance. The shifting function is introduced to improve the traditional prescribed performance control technique, remove the constraint condition on the initial value, and make the constraint bounds have more alternative forms. To estimate the unmeasured state variables and compensate the system fault, the switched dynamic gain extended state observer is constructed, which relaxes the traditional Lipschitz conditions on the nonlinear functions. Based on the proposed observer, by constructing the new Lyapunov function and using the backstepping method, the global robust output feedback controller is designed to make the output track the reference signal successfully, and after the adjustment time, the tracking error enters into the prescribed set. The stability of the system is analyzed by the average dwell time method. Finally, simulation results are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.     

Anatomy comic strips

Comics are powerful visual messages that convey immediate visceral meaning in ways that conventional texts often cannot. This article's authors created comic strips to teach anatomy more interestingly and effectively. Four-frame comic strips were conceptualized from a set of anatomy-related humorous stories gathered from the authors' collective imagination. The comics were drawn on paper and then recreated with digital graphics software. More than 500 comic strips have been drawn and labeled in Korean language, and some of them have been translated into English. All comic strips can be viewed on the Department of Anatomy homepage at the Ajou University School of Medicine, Suwon, Republic of Korea. The comic strips were written and drawn by experienced anatomists, and responses from viewers have generally been favorable. These anatomy comic strips, designed to help students learn the complexities of anatomy in a straightforward and humorous way, are expected to be improved further by the authors and other interested anatomists.     

Pushbutton-activated microfluidic cartridge as a user-friendly sample preparation tool for diagnostics

Microfluidic technologies have several advantages in sample preparation for diagnostics but suffer from the need for an external operation system that hampers user-friendliness. To overcome this limitation in microfluidic technologies, a number of user-friendly methods utilizing capillary force, degassed poly(dimethylsiloxane), pushbutton-driven pressure, a syringe, or a pipette have been reported. Among these methods, the pushbutton-driven, pressure-based method has a great potential to be widely used as a user-friendly sample preparation tool for point-of-care testing or portable diagnostics. In this Perspective, we focus on the pushbutton-activated microfluidic technologies toward a user-friendly sample preparation tool. The working principle and recent advances in pushbutton-activated microfluidic technologies are briefly reviewed, and future perspectives for wide application are discussed in terms of integration with the signal analysis system, user-dependent variation, and universal and facile use.