(N)Olympia in Germany? An analysis of the referendum against Munich 2022

In November 2013, local citizens of Munich and the surrounding districts voted in a referendum against a city’s bid for the 2022 Winter Olympic Games. Since this is but one example of such a failed referendum—others being the ones in Poland, Switzerland and Austria—it is astonishing that it seems to become common practice to conduct public polls regarding the bid for a mega sport event. The city of Hamburg, for instance, will be the next German city to hold a referendum on its bid for the 2024 Olympic Games in November 2015. Against this backdrop, we introduce the ‘Arenatheoretical Model’ into mega event research and conduct a qualitative content analysis of the media coverage on the Munich referendum. Three nationwide German newspapers were analysed as the model suggests that this coverage has a profound influence on the public opinion in other parts of the country. The aim was to identify arguments brought forward to explain the outcome of the referendum. Besides a number of other issues, such as concerns regarding event legacy and regional matters, major findings stress the significance of a damaged brand image of international sport organisations and ‘their’ events. Based on these insights, a number of implications can be derived for other cities/nations and sport organisations that depend on a favourable public opinion in their efforts to stage a mega sport event.     

Review and new evidence on composite innovation indicators for evaluating national performance

The purpose of this contribution is to present a survey of the recent developments in constructing composite science and technology (S&T) indicators on a national level as well as new evidence of the variability of such S&T indicators which opens the gateway to “country-tuning”. It has become standard practice to combine several indicators for science, technology, and innovation to form composite numbers. Especially in the light of this variability, two questions arise. Firstly, are the results (especially rankings) stable with respect to weights? Secondly, is there hope to define “economically” reasonable weights? In order to provide answers to these questions, we use data from the European Innovation Scoreboard 2005 (EIS 2005) to exemplify our reasoning. Concerning the first question, we give genuine evidence on the existence of immense variability, possibly invalidating the results. Further, we also show that even existing and well-accepted methods, like equal weighting, Benefit of the Doubt weighting (BoD) and principal component analysis weighting (PCA) may lead to drastically differing results. Concerning the second question we will demonstrate that by each composite indicator weighting a set of shadow prices is implied expressing one indicator in terms of another. Whether the weights are sensible should be evaluated on the basis of these shadow prices. It turns out that those implied by EIS 2005 contain strange peculiarities. After that we plead for more care in constructing composite indicators. Especially weights should be chosen on the basis of shadow prices, rather than, say, by equal weighting or other automatic methods. Lastly, we discuss the merit of composite indicators and argue that they have a valuable communication and competition function, but they should be accompanied by multidimensional representations, which provide the basis for the construction of policy measures.     

Adopting evidence-based practice in clinical decision making: nurses' perceptions, knowledge, and barriers

Objective:

Evidence-based practice (EBP) provides nurses with a method to use critically appraised and scientifically proven evidence for delivering quality health care to a specific population. The objective of this study was to explore nurses'' awareness of, knowledge of, and attitude toward EBP and factors likely to encourage or create barriers to adoption. In addition, information sources used by nurses and their literature searching skills were also investigated.

Method:

A total of 2,100 copies of the questionnaire were distributed to registered nurses in 2 public hospitals in Singapore, and 1,486 completed forms were returned, resulting in a response rate of 70.8%.

Results:

More than 64% of the nurses expressed a positive attitude toward EBP. However, they pointed out that due to heavy workload, they cannot keep up to date with new evidence. Regarding self-efficacy of EBP-related abilities, the nurses perceived themselves to possess moderate levels of skills. The nurses also felt that EBP training, time availability, and mentoring by nurses with EBP experience would encourage them to implement EBP. The top three barriers to adopting EBP were lack of time, inability to understand statistical terms, and inadequate understanding of the jargon used in research articles. For literature searching, nurses were using basic search features and less than one-quarter of them were familiar with Boolean and proximity operators.

Conclusion:

Although nurses showed a positive attitude toward EBP, certain barriers were hindering their smooth adoption. It is, therefore, desirable that hospital management in Southeast Asia, particularly in Singapore, develop a comprehensive strategy for building EBP competencies through proper training. Moreover, hospital libraries should also play an active role in developing adequate information literacy skills among the nurses.

Highlights

• Nurses in Singapore, as in other countries, support the idea of evidence-based practice (EBP) but have limited skills in the area of literature searching and understanding evidence, which limits their use of evidence-based practice.
• Only a small number of nurses were able to pick an appropriate search strategy for a given topic, indicating a lack of basic literature searching skills.
• Sufficient literature searching knowledge is essential to retrieve current, relevant, and accurate evidence. However, a majority of nurses do not know how to properly use Boolean and proximity operators, indexing, truncation, or limits.

Implications

• Librarians need to be part of providing ongoing training for clinical nurses in searching the evidence, especially in hospitals promoting EBP or seeking Magnet status.
• Training is needed for clinical nurses to be able to achieve the use of EBP, and librarians can support this goal by teaching the search strategies portion of an EBP skills course.
• This study''s instrument could be used by librarians as a needs assessment tool to measure their own clinical nurses'' information literacy skills, if justification is needed locally.

     

FROM DATA PROCESSING TO KNOWLEDGE PROCESSING: A FUNDAMENTAL DEVELOPMENT TENDENCY OF INFORMATICS AND OF COMPUTERS AND ITS REFLECTION IN THE TRAINING OFFERED AT A TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY

For, more than two decades, Artificial Intelligence developed in relative isolation from “traditional informatics”. Thus, a distinct reservoir of specifically theoretical underlying principles, methods and means were created for it. At present, a process of fusing and of integration between these two domains is under way. Linked to this process is a marked broadening and deepening of the scientific fundamentals and the efficiency potential of modern information technologies. Yet, the potential for increased efficiency is far from being exhausted, particularly with regard to application. Written from the point of view of a computer scientist, this article analyses the practical problems and the obstacles which have appeared during the process of transition to the level of knowledge processing. The procedures which have been devised in order to overcome the problems in question are aimed not only at increasing the quality of knowledge representation and knowledge administration but also at introducing artificial intelligence into traditional application areas. The consistent pursuit of these aims will lead to the integration of artificial intelligence and informatics, so as to produce a homogeneous, scientific discipline. Integration of this sort, however, cannot be accomplished by the simple addition of new components or by placing the two domains side by side. Rather, informatics as a discipline must be restructured and the contents of its separate domains unified. The integration process has been particularly noticeable in the domain of data bank technology, especially with regard to knowledge representation and knowledge bank administration. This process has led to a qualitatively more advanced development stage as compared t o traditional data bank technology and knowledge administration. It is reflected in higher education in the transition from the traditional qualifications of knowledge engineers to those of data bank and knowledge processing engineers.     

Retelling herstory: to be a female Bedouin teacher differently

The aim of this article is to contribute to the discussion on education in Palestinian/Bedouin society in the Negev in Israel and it proposes the narrative of female trainee teachers as the basis of an analysis of the changing status of Bedouin women and their community. The academic discourse on teaching in Bedouin society ignores the potential existence of an alternative discussion outside the dichotomous area of ‘traditional and modern’ and/or ‘Jewish and Bedouin’. Bedouin society in the Negev constitutes a particularly interesting case for a meaningful study of the perception of teaching, chiefly because education has already become a significant practice in the life of a community that seeks integration into Israeli society. The teaching profession gives Bedouin women from the Negev a relatively new opportunity to integrate into education and employment and by so doing they reconstruct a new educational discourse.

Il’il: When we were little, we used to laugh about me—hmm—a teacher. Me with pupils, and I’d teach them, like the teacher who used to teach us, with a little board, and I write for them and they are my pupils, as it were, and I give them tests and all sorts. And I love the profession very, very much because I love the pupils…

Nura: I loved learning but this isn’t the profession that I want to study—to be a teacher … You can help someone in this profession. I see myself going in that direction … First of all, you have to give, to impart something to the children in front of you, who have come to learn. You have to give to these children, to be conscientious. You don’t just come. You haven’t chosen the profession because you wanted to, but you have to cope with it.     

Educating science teachers in the twenty-first century: implications for pre-service teacher education

Abstract

This study examines the verbal interactions among a group of pre-service teachers as they engaged in scientific discussions in a medicinal chemistry course. These discussions were part of the course that encompassed an explicit instruction of scientific argumentation structures as well as an applied component, whereby the pre-service teachers learned the content of medicinal chemistry through cases developed using the strategy of competing theories. By adopting a case study approach using sociocultural framework of learning, we examined the interactions between the pre-service teachers using video data. We describe 12 possible forms of interactions during discussions – (1) seeking clarification, (2) figuring out loud, (3) sharing information, (4) agreement, (5) asking questions, (6) providing explanations, (7) raising strategic and procedural issues, (8) stating claims, (9) disagreement, (10) sharing perspectives, (11) offering alternatives, and (12) persuasion. The pre-service teachers engaged in figuring out aloud and seeking clarifications frequently, and used persuasion least in their discussions. To clarify their ideas and thoughts, pre-service teachers commonly rebut their counterparts and used warrants to support their own assertions. A similar pattern was also observed when figuring their thoughts out loud. Our findings suggest that pre-service teachers were able to carry out rebuttals in the argumentation process. However, the quality and function of their rebuttals can be improved by deepening their understanding of the subject matter knowledge and the science argumentation structure. Implications are discussed.