Joining forces for public value creation? Exploring collaborative innovation in smart city initiatives

Creating public value is a key goal of public administrations, both in their daily business and in the growing field of smart government and smart cities, which focuses on IT-enabled innovations in the public sphere. However, many public administrations still struggle with such innovations due to complex technologies, high investments, and the numerous stakeholders involved. To address this issue, some local governments in continental Europe have turned to collaborative innovation approaches, partnering with (semi-)public utility companies in the hope that their additional innovation assets will boost innovativeness. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how exactly such collaborations should be governed to ensure that the focus remains on creating public value, as utility companies may have their own agendas. To explore this question, we conducted a comparative case study in the context of smart city initiatives with four cases in Swiss local governments. Drawing on agency and stewardship theory, we then propose a model of public-value-focused collaborative innovation, enabling us to explore various collaboration characteristics and their effects on public value creation. Our findings suggest that both agency- and stewardship-based collaborations increase innovativeness. However, while agency collaborations tend to produce smart city innovations that mainly serve the utility companies' business interests, stewardship relationships lead to innovations that are focused more on public value creation. As such, our study extends the literature on the effects of collaborative innovation on public value, and it provides practical recommendations on how such collaborative innovation should be designed.     

Embedded Technical Expression: Code and the Leveraging of Functionality

In this article, I argue that a key problem for understanding the social ramifications of software is an implicit separation of software programs into two separate elements: expressive aspects, which are seen as socially driven and affectual, and functional aspects, understood as scientific and rational. In order to overcome this binary, I develop an alternative framework that examines the ways software expresses best practices, correct behaviors, and social organization. A key element of this framework is an understanding of software programs as simultaneously rhetorical and tangible objects. Given that Western society is dependent on sociotechnical systems in which software plays a crucial role, understanding the complex ways software expresses normative tasks, practices, and social orders is increasingly important.     

Fun with numbers: Alternative models for predicting salary levels

The increasing awareness and concern with equity issues in higher education, along with the escalating litigation, has prompted institutions to undertake salary prediction studies. Four prediction models (built on a males only and total sample) were compared: (1) entering all variables, (2) excluding rank and tenure, (3) using predicted rank and tenure, and (4) using only objective variables. Models were tested using all permanent full-time faculty at a large midwestern university. Using predicted rank and tenure was the most suitable for equity studies. Including all variables yielded the best results for explaining/predicting reward systems. The other two models did not appear appropriate for either purpose. The males only sample consistently produced the largest bias effects. Institutions considering a salary prediction study should find these outcomes helpful in determining appropriate analytical strategies.     

A developmental theory for Aristotelian practical intelligence

Abstract

In Aristotelian virtue theories, phronesis is foundational to being good, but to date accounts of how this particularly important virtue can emerge are sketchy. This article plumbs recent thinking in Aristotelian virtue ethics and developmental theorizing to explore how far its emergence can be understood developmentally, i.e., in terms of the growth in ordinary conditions of underlying psychological capacities, dispositions, and the like. The purpose is not to explicate Aristotle, nor to assimilate Aristotelian ideas to cognitive developmental moral theorizing, but to draw on both to build an independently plausible theory of practical intelligence and its development. It is argued that one fruitful direction attends to the psychology of virtues Aristotle associates with practical intelligence, including comprehension, understanding, sense, and cleverness, instead of Aristotle’s remarks distinguishing fully virtuous persons from the continent, incontinent and the many.     

Age-related differences in repeated-sprint ability in highly trained youth football players

Abstract

In this study, we investigated the age-related differences in repeated-sprint ability and blood lactate responses in 134 youth football players. Players from the development programme of a professional club were grouped according to their respective under-age team (U-11 to U-18). Following familiarization, the participants performed a repeated-sprint ability test [6 × 30-m sprints 30 s apart, with active recovery (2.0–2.2 m · s^?1) between sprints]. The test variables were total time, percent sprint decrement, and post-test peak lactate concentration. Total time improved from the U-11 to U-15 age groups (range 33.15 ± 1.84 vs. 27.25 ± 0.82 s), whereas no further significant improvements were evident from U-15 to U-18. No significant differences in percent sprint decrement were reported among groups (range 4.0 ± 1.0% to 5.5 ± 2.1%). Post-test peak lactate increased from one age group to the next (range 7.3 ± 1.8 to 12.6 ± 1.6 mmol · l^?1), but remained constant when adjusted for age-related difference in body mass. Peak lactate concentration was moderately correlated with sprint time (r = 0.70, P > 0.001). Our results suggest that performance in repeated-sprint ability improves during maturation of highly trained youth football players, although a plateau occurs from 15 years of age. In contrast to expectations based on previous suggestions, percent sprint decrement during repeated sprints did not deteriorate with age.     

为什么钟表的默认时间都是10：10

你有没有注意过,买手表之前,手表的时间总是设定在10点10分。这是为什么呢？有人说是为了纪念被刺杀的总统,有人说是为了纪念广岛、长崎原子弹爆炸的死难者,其实都不然。那真正的原因是什么呢？     

Conceptual continuity and the science of baseball: using informal science literacy to promote students’ science learning

This project explores conceptual continuity as a framework for understanding students’ native ways of understanding and describing. Conceptual continuity suggests that the relationship between the use of words in one genre and the scientific genre can exist at varying levels of association. This perspective can reveal the varied relationships between ideas explained in everyday or vernacular genres and their association to scientific explanations. We conducted a 2-year study involving 15 high school baseball players’ understanding of the physics involved in baseball. First, we conducted a quantitative assessment of their science understanding by administering a test prior to season one (2006) and season two (2007). Second, we examined the types of linguistic resources students used to explain their understanding. Third, we revisited our data by using conceptual continuity to identify similarities between students’ conceptual understanding in the informal contexts and their similarities to canonical scientific ideas. The results indicated students’ performance on the multiple-choice questions suggested no significant improvement. The qualitative analyses revealed that students were able to accurately explain different components of the idea by using a diversity of scientific and non-scientific genres. These results call attention to the need to reconstruct our vision of science learning to include a more language sensitive approach to teaching and learning.