INI-GraphicsNet

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Überzeugungen vom Englischlernen

Der Beitrag fragt, ob das Konzept der überzeugungen für die sprachen-bzw. englischdidaktische Forschung von Nutzen sein kann. Dazu wird zun?chst kurz die Diskussion der epistemologischen überzeugungen von Schülerinnen und Schülern in der dritten TIMS-Studie vorgestellt. Danach werden einige Ergebnisse aus der angloamerikanischen und deutschsprachigen Forschungsliteratur zu überzeugungen vom Sprachenlernen referiert. Am Beispiel eines empirischen Forschungsprojektes werden ansatzweise überzeugungen zweier Englischlehrender zum Grammatiklernen analysiert. Im Ergebnis vertritt der Autor die These, dass die Erforschung der überzeugungen von Lehrenden und Lernenden im Kontext von Schule ein notwendiges und deshalb zu intensivierendes, wenngleich nicht hinreichendes Element der Entwicklung von fremdsprachlichem Unterricht ist.     

A novel technology-industry concordance table based on linked inventor-establishment data

Mapping technologies into industries is frequently required in empirical innovation studies, but many concordances only provide coarse mappings. We develop a novel concordance between industries and technologies making use of linked inventor-employee data for a large sample of German patents filed at the European Patent Office between 1999 and 2011. Inventors listed on these patents are matched and disambiguated with German social security records. Employment data recorded in this database include detailed industry codes describing the industrial activities of the inventors’ establishments. These linked microdata allow us to identify the precise industrial origin of inventions, combine them with technology classifications from the inventors’ patents and to generate novel concordance tables. We evaluate our approach by comparing the concordances with existing work. Moreover, in an empirical application, we find that patent based indicators represent valid proxies for the innovation performance of industries and thus help to measure innovation in the absence of other survey based indicators. Service sector innovation activities, however, appear to be barely represented by the patenting activities of inventors and establishments.     

Stair self-efficacy questionnaire to test the ability of stair negotiation for older people

Background

Older adults face different challenges that affect their daily living. One of the most challenging and hazardous activities of everyday living, especially in the elderly, is stair climbing. Therefore the ability of stair climbing is inter alia used as an indicator for physical fitness and an independent life without the need of support. But until now there has not been an alternative to test the stair climbing ability than to actually climb stairs by using the stair up and down test. Therefore, this study evaluates a self-efficacy questionnaire as a complementing instrument to predict stair climbing abilities.

Methods

A new instrument has been developed for German-speaking countries to assess the role of stair self-efficacy for older people (SSE). The instrument, based on the questionnaire from Hamel and Cavanagh (2004), assesses stair self-efficacy during the performance of 10 different staircase management situations and gathers information about participation in these staircase situations. Reliability and construct validity of the questionnaire were tested with a sample of 121 older adults who completed the SSE questionnaire and the Activities-specific Balance Confidence (ABC-D) scale. As an additional validity check, 90 participants performed stair climbing in a physical test.

Results

Statistical analysis via a factor analysis showed that the SSE questionnaire is one-dimensional. In addition, reliability was tested by using Cronbach’s alpha and the split-half method via Spearman–Brown to calculate the internal consistency. Both methods yielded adequate results and furthermore the reliability was established via the results of the test–retest reliability. Validity was tested by the parallel testing, using the Pearson correlation between the SSE score and ABC scale, as well as physical testing.

Conclusions

Taken together, the SSE questionnaire offers the possibility to evaluate stair climbing performance without the need for physical performance. This questionnaire is especially helpful because the participants do not need to become physically stressed and exposed to the risk of falling before they are confident enough to climb stairs.

     

Aspektorientierte Programmiertechniken im Unit-Testen

Der Artikel untersucht, wie Probleme, die speziell beim Unit-Testen objektorientierter Programme auftreten, mit Hilfe des Paradigmas aspektorientierte Programmierung gel?st werden k?nnen. Die Untersuchung stellt Schritt für Schritt die einzelnen Teilprobleme vor, f"uhrt konventionelle L?sungen auf, zeigt aspektorientierte Alternativen für die gestellten Probleme und erl"autert anhand von Code-Beispielen ihre Implementierung in der Sprache AspectJ. Die Untersuchung begleitend wird das Testframework FlexTest vorgestellt, das die praktische Umsetzbarkeit der vorgestellten Ideen demonstriert. The article examines whether problems that occur specifically during unit testing of object-oriented programs can be solved using the aspect-oriented programming paradigm. It presents the various subproblems step by step, shows conventional solutions, describes aspect-oriented solutions to the problems in a general and language-independent manner, and concludes by looking at the aspect-oriented implementation in the language AspectJ. Parallel to this, we present the test framework FlexTest, which demonstrates the practical implementability of our ideas.

CR Subject Classification D.2.5     

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.     

Understanding access to higher education amongst humanitarian migrants: an analysis of Australian longitudinal survey data

Higher Education - Humanitarian migrants are amongst the most marginalised population groups in countries within the Global North, including Australia. An important channel for these migrants to...     

Plasticity of human handedness: Decreased one-hand bias and inter-manual performance asymmetry in expert basketball players

Abstract

Athletes frequently have to adapt their skills to fast changes of play, often requiring the flexible execution of a particular movement skill with either hand. To assess the influence of sport-specific expertise and extensive sport training on human laterality, a video analysis of regular basketball games was performed for professional, semi-professional, and amateur players to investigate how non-dominant hand use and proficiency change with increasing expertise. Our results showed that the right-hand (i.e. dominant hand) bias in basketball players is reduced with increasing expertise (i.e. competitive level). Accordingly, we found that professional players use their non-dominant hand more often and with greater success than semi-professional and amateur players. This was true for most of the basketball-specific skills. Based on these results, we assume that increasing amounts of bilateral practice can lead to a shift in task-specific manual preference towards a higher use of both hands in competition, as well as to a higher proficiency for non-dominant hand actions in particular. From an applied perspective, the more frequent use and higher proficiency of the non-dominant hand in professional basketball players, compared with amateurs, suggests that the context-specific and skilled use of the non-dominant hand is crucial for successful play at higher competitive levels in the sport of basketball.     

A computational fluid dynamics model for wind simulation: model implementation and experimental validation

To provide physically based wind modelling for wind erosion research at regional scale, a 3D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) wind model was developed. The model was programmed in C language based on the Navier-Stokes equations, and it is freely available as open source. Integrated with the spatial analysis and modelling tool (SAMT), the wind model has convenient input preparation and powerful output visualization. To validate the wind model, a series of experiments was conducted in a wind tunnel. A blocking inflow experiment was designed to test the performance of the model on simulation of basic fluid processes. A round obstacle experiment was designed to check if the model could simulate the influences of the obstacle on wind field. Results show that measured and simulated wind fields have high correlations, and the wind model can simulate both the basic processes of the wind and the influences of the obstacle on the wind field. These results show the high reliability of the wind model. A digital elevation model (DEM) of an area (3800 m long and 1700 m wide) in the Xilingele grassland in Inner Mongolia (autonomous region, China) was applied to the model, and a 3D wind field has been successfully generated. The clear implementation of the model and the adequate validation by wind tunnel experiments laid a solid foundation for the prediction and assessment of wind erosion at regional scale.