The forgotten promise of e-government maturity: Assessing responsiveness in the digital public sector

Assessing e-government responsiveness is one of the major gaps in the currently dominant e-government maturity models. While we have a relatively large pool of models focusing on technological and organizational integration from a supply side perspective, measures of responsiveness of e-government systems from a user perspective are still lacking. Replicating a study from New Zealand and Australia, this study explores the response time and quality of e-mail response in Danish local and central governments (N = 175). Despite that Denmark is high ranking in international benchmark studies, we find that one third of central government agencies did not respond at all, and close to 80% of the ministries provided none or incomplete answers. Local government responds faster and provides answers that are more complete and accurate than those provided by central government. Implications for e-government are discussed.     

Microfluidic wet spinning of chitosan-alginate microfibers and encapsulation of HepG2 cells in fibers

The successful encapsulation of human hepatocellular carcinoma (HepG2) cells would greatly assist a broad range of applications in tissue engineering. Due to the harsh conditions during standard chitosan fiber fabrication processes, encapsulation of HepG2 cells in chitosan fibers has been challenging. Here, we describe the successful wet-spinning of chitosan-alginate fibers using a coaxial flow microfluidic chip. We determined the optimal mixing conditions for generating chitosan-alginate fibers, including a 1:5 ratio of 2% (w∕w) water-soluble chitosan (WSC) solution to 2% (w∕w) alginate solution. Ratio including higher than 2% (w∕w) WSC solution increased aggregation throughout the mixture. By suspending cells in the WSC-alginate solution, we successfully fabricated HepG2 cell-laden fibers. The encapsulated HepG2 cells in the chitosan-alginate fibers were more viable than cells encapsulated in pure alginate fibers, suggesting that cross-linked chitosan provides a better environment for HepG2 cells than alginate alone. In addition, we found that the adhesion of HepG2 cells on the chitosan-alginate fiber is much better than that on the alginate fibers.     

Epidemiology in Middle School Science Curricula: a COVID-19 Pre–post Intervention

Journal of Science Education and Technology - It is of great importance that science educators teach COVID-19 and related pandemics to boost students’ scientific literacy. A mixed methods...     

The Expression of Depressive Symptomatology in Korean American Undergraduates: Sex and Generational Differences

This study examined the influence of acculturation and perception of the university environment on the depressive symptomatology of 228 Korean American undergraduates, with a focus on sex and generational differences. Perceptions of the university environment and perceived barriers were positive predictors of depressive symptomatology in respective regression equations by sex and generation. Study limitations and counseling practice implications are discussed.     

A decade revisited and a step toward the future: incremental but quintessential progress

This study scrutinizes Asia Pacific Education Review (APER) that has been weathered 13 years of journey from its inception. Numerically, 504 peer-reviewed articles have been published so far, and 0.5 of impact factor has been achieved. This article recollects the history of APER, overhaul the accomplishment and shortcomings of it. Through an overview of the annually submitted and published articles, 14 domains of research area, research methods, and the demographics of contributors were examined; 30 nationalities of authors’ papers were published, and 2/3 of articles used quantitative research method. The most published domains were educational administration and policy, educational psychology and special education, and higher education; however, the most cited articles covered all research area of education impartially. This study also suggested APER’s contribution to the advancement of education research community internationally and interdisciplinarily.     

Graphene Based Electrochemical Sensor for the Detection of Volatile Organic Compounds

Many household consumables contain volatile organic compounds(VOCs)as the active ingredient.Long term exposure to VOCs could cause various health problems,especially to the respiratory system.Graphene has attracted a lot of attention recently for its potential to be used as sensing material for VOCs.In this project we have constructed graphene/PVA composite based gas sensors for VOC detection.It was perceived that the polymer could introduce better selectivity to the sensor.Results suggest that the proposed sensor is highly sensitive to low molecular weight VOCs and that the manner in which the sensor respond to the vapour depends on the polarity or hydrophobicity of the vapour.     

Gender brilliance stereotype emerges early and predicts children's motivation in South Korea

Recent work suggests that the stereotype associating brilliance with men may underpin women's underrepresentation in prestigious careers, yet little is known about its development and consequences in non-Western contexts. The present research examined the onset of this stereotype and its relation to children's motivation in 5- to 7-year-old Korean children (N = 272, 50% girls, tested 2021 to 2022). At age 7, children attributed brilliance to men when evaluating Asians and Whites, and girls became less interested in participating in intellectually challenging tasks than boys. Notably, this gender difference in interest was mediated by children's endorsement of the stereotype. The generalizable early emergence of the gender brilliance stereotype and its detrimental implications press the need to tackle gender imbalance in early childhood.     

Understanding the majority opinion formation process in online environments: An exploratory approach to Facebook

Majority opinions are often observed in the process of social interaction in online communities, but few studies have addressed this issue with empirical data. To identify an appropriate theoretical lens for explaining majority opinions in online environments, this study investigates the skewness statistic, which indicates how many “Likes” are skewed to major comments on a Facebook post; 3489 posts are gathered from the New York Times Facebook page for 100 days. Results show that time is not an influential factor for skewness increase, but the number of comments has a logarithmic relation to skewness increase. Regression models and Chow tests show that this relationship differs depending on topic contents, but majority opinions are significant in overall. These results suggest that the bandwagon effect due to social affordance can be a suitable mechanism for explaining majority opinion formation in an online environment and that majority opinions in online communities can be misperceived due to overestimation.     

Testing Measurement Invariance Across Groups in Longitudinal Data: Multigroup Second-Order Latent Growth Model

In latent growth modeling, measurement invariance across groups has received little attention. Considering that a group difference is commonly of interest in social science, a Monte Carlo study explored the performance of multigroup second-order latent growth modeling (MSLGM) in testing measurement invariance. True positive and false positive rates in detecting noninvariance across groups in addition to bias estimates of major MSLGM parameters were investigated. Simulation results support the suitability of MSLGM for measurement invariance testing when either forward or iterative likelihood ratio procedure is applied.