Accommodations: staff identity and university space

Space has been of growing significance in social theory in recent years, yet, explorations of it in the scholarship of higher education have been limited. This is surprising, given the critical role space has in shaping staff and students' engagement with the university. Taking a practice-based approach and focusing on academic identities, this article analyses the spatial experience of an institution by defamiliarising spaces encountered in everyday work. We identify formative pressures upon institutional space, and how space then shapes experience: university spaces are designed for one purpose but come to be used for many, so that working within them can be a diverse and contradictory experience. The identification of academics with spaces is complex, and there are no simple experiences of belonging; rather, there is a constant project of identity-formation and change within mutable spaces.     

'I Caught the Sudden Look of Some Dead Master': Eliot's Tradition and Modern Materialism

This essay explores the relations between T. S. Eliot's concept of tradition and the ‘modern materialism’ of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan and Louis Althusser, and considers the implications of this resonance for both Eliot's critical legacy and the Marxist tradition. Initially surveying the critical controversy surrounding the canonical figure of Eliot and recent attempts to reconcile his avant-garde poetics with his reactionary social thought, the essay traces the roots of Eliot's tradition in a Nietzschean critique of historicism and its development into a theory of culture. Eliot's persistent drive towards impersonality echoes (and problematises) the efforts of Benjamin, Lacan and Althusser to construct a model of the social process that incorporates the unconscious. Rather than ultimately determining a set of political positions, the ‘missed encounter’ between Eliot's tradition and ‘modern materialism’ draws to light the Hegelian historicisms that haunt materialist theories of culture.     

Gender-Typed and Gender-Segregated Play Among Tanzanian Hadza and Congolese BaYaka Hunter-Gatherer Children and Adolescents

Few data exist on gender-typed and gender-segregated play in hunter-gatherer societies, despite their unique demographic and cultural features which may influence children’s gendered play. Using naturalistic observations of Hadza (N = 46, 41% female) and BaYaka (N = 65, 48% female) hunter-gatherer 3- to 18-year-olds from Tanzania and the Republic of Congo, we showed that access to playmates was negatively associated with playing in mixed-gender groups. Young boys did not engage in more rough-and-tumble play than girls, but adolescent boys participated in this type of play more than adolescent girls. Children were also more likely to participate in work-themed play which conformed to gender norms within their society. Findings are discussed within the context of gendered division of labor, child autonomy, and demography.     

Revisiting the cluster-based paradigm for implicit search result diversification

To cope with ambiguous and/or underspecified queries, search result diversification (SRD) is a key technique that has attracted a lot of attention. This paper focuses on implicit SRD, where the subtopics underlying a query are unknown. Many existing methods appeal to the greedy strategy for generating diversified results. A common practice is using a heuristic criterion for making the locally optimal choice at each round. As a result, it is difficult to know whether the failures are caused by the optimization criterion or the setting of parameters. Different from previous studies, we formulate implicit SRD as a process of selecting and ranking k exemplar documents through integer linear programming (ILP). The key idea is that: for a specific query, we expect to maximize the overall relevance of the k exemplar documents. Meanwhile, we wish to maximize the representativeness of the selected exemplar documents with respect to the non-selected documents. Intuitively, if the selected exemplar documents concisely represent the entire set of documents, the novelty and diversity will naturally arise. Moreover, we propose two approaches ILP4ID (Integer Linear Programming for Implicit SRD) and AP4ID (Affinity Propagation for Implicit SRD) for solving the proposed formulation of implicit SRD. In particular, ILP4ID appeals to the strategy of bound-and-branch and is able to obtain the optimal solution. AP4ID being an approximate method transforms the target problem as a maximum-a-posteriori inference problem, and the message passing algorithm is adopted to find the solution. Furthermore, we investigate the differences and connections between the proposed models and prior models by casting them as different variants of the cluster-based paradigm for implicit SRD. To validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches, we conduct a series of experiments on four benchmark TREC diversity collections. The experimental results demonstrate that: (1) The proposed methods, especially ILP4ID, can achieve substantially improved performance over the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods for implicit SRD. (2) The initial runs, the number of input documents, query types, the ways of computing document similarity, the pre-defined cluster number and the optimization algorithm significantly affect the performance of diversification models. Careful examinations of these factors are highly recommended in the development of implicit SRD methods. Based on the in-depth study of different types of methods for implicit SRD, we provide additional insight into the cluster-based paradigm for implicit SRD. In particular, how the methods relying on greedy strategies impact the performance of implicit SRD, and how a particular diversification model should be fine-tuned.     

Optimised force-velocity training during pre-season enhances physical performance in professional rugby league players

ABSTRACT

The effectiveness of 8-week force-velocity optimised training was assessed in highly trained professional rugby league athletes. Players (age 24 ± 3 years; body mass 94.9 ± 21.6 kg; height 181.3 ± 6.0 cm) were strength-matched and assigned to a force-velocity optimised group (OP; n = 15) or a general strength-power group (GP; n = 14). Tests included 10-m, 20-m sprints, 3 repetition-maximum squat and squat jumps over five load conditions to ascertain vertical force-velocity relationship. ANCOVA revealed there was a group effect for force-velocity deficit (P < 0.001), with the OP two-fold greater than the GP group (OP pre: 51.13 ± 31.42%, post: 62.26 ± 31.45%, GP pre: 33.00 ± 19.60%, post: 31.14 ± 31.45%, P < 0.001). There were further group effects for 3RM squat (OP pre: 151.17 ± 22.95 kg, post: 162.17 ± 24.16 kg, GP pre: 156.43 ± 25.07 kg, post: 163.39 ± 25.39 kg, P < 0.001), peak power (OP pre: 3195 ± 949 W, post: 3552 ± 1033 W, GP pre: 3468 ± 911 W, post: 3591 ± 936 W, P < 0.001), and SJ (OP pre: 39.79 ± 7.80 cm, post: 42.69 ± 7.83 cm, GP pre: 40.44 ± 6.23 cm, post: 41.14 ± 5.66 cm, P < 0.001). Prescribing F-V deficit training is superior for improving physical performance within highly trained RL players.     

From peripheral to full participation in a blended trade bargaining simulation

This article considers the extent and nature of student participation in a trade bargaining simulation from a community of practice perspective. This third‐year economics module included a blend of online communication (through email, online chats and online discussions) and face‐to‐face meetings, both in smaller bargaining groups and in whole class plenary meetings. Our method of analysis includes the use of Exchange Structure Analysis of text chats and face‐to‐face learning conversations, triangulated by observation, survey and interview data. The focus on community of practice enables us to offer a nuanced interpretation of differences in crude participation data derived from the online chats. Superficially, the data may suggest marginalisation of participants, but Wenger's (1988 ) notion of peripheral participation with a trajectory towards full participation reframes the disparities in terms of an active community of practice. Some members are fully engaged with the practices of trade bargaining from the early stages of the simulation, while others move towards full participation over the duration of the simulation. Our results suggest that the laboratory‐based online text chats did provide opportunities for student participation in the simulation, and that male and female students exhibited different patterns of participation in the chats.     

New Directions for Academic Libraries in Research Staffing: A Case Study at National University of Ireland Galway

ABSTRACT

New research needs, global developments and local shifts in emphasis are demanding a broader range of interactions by librarians with researchers and are challenging previous staffing structures. Research has a higher institutional profile and academic libraries have responded by creating new roles and staffing models, with stronger linkage across campus as partners rather than supporters. Particular circumstances at National University of Ireland Galway have shaped its Library's staffing configuration for research. These include the emergence of digital scholarship across campus, opportunities offered by a new research building, the growing importance of archives and the publication of a new institutional strategy. Significant reductions in staffing and budget are influential too. Distinctive features in the revised staffing model are organization by function instead of subject, prioritization of engagement with digital scholarship, distributed management of archives and special collections, and a particular emphasis on contribution across multiple teams. This case study reports early gains and challenges.     

Coming Back from Disaster: Progress to Date and Next Steps at Elliot Lake Public Library

In this article, I do two things. First, I describe and evaluate progress that has been made to date on implementing five recommendations made by the author to the leadership of Elliot Lake Public Library in 2014, intended to assist in disaster recovery efforts following the destruction of the library in an anthropogenic disaster in 2012. Second, I provide three revised recommendations, this time intended to assist library leadership address some continuing challenges that are preventing the complete recovery of the library, and ultimately, negatively impacting the effectiveness of the library within the community.     

Toward collaborator selection and determination of data ownership and publication authorship in research collaborations

This study examined factors that might affect researchers' willingness to collaborate with a specific researcher and the priorities given to those factors. In addition, it investigated how researchers determined the ownership of collaborative project data and how they determined the order of authorship on collaborative publications in condensed matter physics. In general, researchers rated their intrinsic motivations the highest, such as the quality of ideas a potential collaborator might have and their satisfaction with a past collaboration, followed by their extrinsic motivations, such as the complementary knowledge, skills, or resources the collaborator could provide. In addition, researchers who had a greater number of collaborative projects and researchers who had served as a project PI or co-PI valued the deep-level, personality-related characteristics of a collaborator higher than did those who had not. Younger researchers were more risk averse and more concerned with a collaborator's reputation and the possible cost of a collaboration decision. Additionally, younger researchers indicated more often than older researchers that they did not know whether their project teams followed any rules or norms or engaged in negotiation to determine the order of authorship on collaborative publications.