On the complementarity between online and offline music consumption: the case of free streaming

From a representative survey of 2,000 individuals, we study whether consumption of music through streaming services, like Spotify or YouTube, is a substitute or a complement to physical music consumption modes, such as CDs and live music. Controlling for the taste for music, various socio-demographic characteristics and the usual determinants of music consumption either offline (radio, TV, friends/relatives) or online (online recommendations, social networks), our results show that free music streaming (where the consumer does not possess the music but only has access to it) has no significant effect on CD sales and affects positively live music attendance, but only for national or international artists who are more likely to be available on streaming services.     

Measurement Invariance Testing with Many Groups: A Comparison of Five Approaches

With the increasing use of international survey data especially in cross-cultural and multinational studies, establishing measurement invariance (MI) across a large number of groups in a study is essential. Testing MI over many groups is methodologically challenging, however. We identified 5 methods for MI testing across many groups (multiple group confirmatory factor analysis, multilevel confirmatory factor analysis, multilevel factor mixture modeling, Bayesian approximate MI testing, and alignment optimization) and explicated the similarities and differences of these approaches in terms of their conceptual models and statistical procedures. A Monte Carlo study was conducted to investigate the efficacy of the 5 methods in detecting measurement noninvariance across many groups using various fit criteria. Generally, the 5 methods showed reasonable performance in identifying the level of invariance if an appropriate fit criterion was used (e.g., Bayesian information criteron with multilevel factor mixture modeling). Finally, general guidelines in selecting an appropriate method are provided.     

Negotiating contradictions in developing teacher identity during the EAL practicum in Australia

This paper reports on how Maria (pseudonym), a non-native English speaker (NNES) and preservice teacher (PST) of English as an additional language (EAL), developed her professional identity during the practicum in an Australian secondary school. Drawing on activity theory, the study identified contradictions in Maria’s practicum activity and examined how Maria’s professional identity developed through her negotiation of the contradictions. Data included interviews with Maria before, during and after the practicum, her reflections, an interview with her school mentor (Ms Davies, pseudonym), and relevant documents. The findings reveal that Maria experienced contradictions between her multiple identities of NNES, student, becoming teacher, and classroom teacher, between her mentor’s teaching approach and that of her own, and between her practice and rules. The findings provide implications for researching teacher identity and supporting preservice EAL teachers in developing productive teacher identities during the practicum.     

Design of a fast real-time LPV model predictive control system for semi-active suspension control of a full vehicle

This article is concerned with the control of a Semi-Active suspension system of a 7DOF Full Vehicle model, equipped with four Electro Rheological (ER) dampers, taking into account their incipient dissipativity constraints. Herein, a real-time, fast, advanced control structure is presented within the Model Predictive Control framework for Linear Parameter Varying (LPV) systems. The control algorithm is developed to provide a suitable trade-off between comfort and handling performances of the vehicle in a very limited sampling period ($T_s=5\text{ms}$), in view of a possible realtime implementation on a real vehicle. The control structure is tested and compared to other standard fast control approaches. Full nonlinear realistic simulation results illustrate the overall good operation and behaviour of the proposed control approach.     

Label-free microfluidic characterization of temperature-dependent biomolecular interactions

We present a microfluidic approach to characterizing temperature-dependent biomolecular interactions. Solvated L-arginine vasopressin (AVP) and its immobilized RNA aptamer (spiegelmer) were allowed to achieve equilibrium binding in a microchip at a series of selected temperatures. Unbound AVP were collected and analyzed with matrix-assisted laser desorption∕ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI-MS), yielding melting curves that reveal highly temperature-dependent zones in which affinity binding (36–45 °C) or dissociation (25–33 °C and 50–65 °C) occurs. Additionally, temperature-dependent binding isotherms were constructed; from these, thermodynamic quantities involved in binding were extracted. The results illustrated a strong change in heat capacity of interaction for this system, suggesting a considerable thermodynamic influence controlling vasopressin-spiegelmer interaction.     

The discourse of design: Patterns of TPACK Contribution during pre-service teacher learning design conversations

Education and Information Technologies - Analysing pre-service teachers’ learning design conversations in relation to Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework to...     

Web document summarization by exploiting social context with matrix co-factorization

In the context of social media, users usually post relevant information corresponding to the contents of events mentioned in a Web document. This information posses two important values in that (i) it reflects the content of an event and (ii) it shares hidden topics with sentences in the main document. In this paper, we present a novel model to capture the nature of relationships between document sentences and post information (comments or tweets) in sharing hidden topics for summarization of Web documents by utilizing relevant post information. Unlike previous methods which are usually based on hand-crafted features, our approach ranks document sentences and user posts based on their importance to the topics. The sentence-user-post relation is formulated in a share topic matrix, which presents their mutual reinforcement support. Our proposed matrix co-factorization algorithm computes the score of each document sentence and user post and extracts the top ranked document sentences and comments (or tweets) as a summary. We apply the model to the task of summarization on three datasets in two languages, English and Vietnamese, of social context summarization and also on DUC 2004 (a standard corpus of the traditional summarization task). According to the experimental results, our model significantly outperforms the basic matrix factorization and achieves competitive ROUGE-scores with state-of-the-art methods.     

Does evaluating peer assessment accuracy and taking it into account in calculating assessor’s final score enhance online peer assessment quality?

Education and Information Technologies - Peer assessment has an important role in teaching and learning nowadays. However, the existing techniques tend to be limited due to a lack of a suitable...     

Re-imagining teachers’ identity and professionalism under the condition of international education

Around the world, 4.3 million students are engaged in international education each year. However, there is a paucity in theory and empirical research on teachers’ professionalism in international education. This paper aims to fill out this gap and contribute to our understanding of teachers’ changing roles and identity due to the impact of internationalisation and the growth of international students. Drawing on positioning theory as a conceptual framework to understand teachers’ roles and identity, this paper shows the emergence of teacher sub-identities as a reciprocal intercultural learner and an adaptive agent. It argues that these sub-identities are central to teachers’ development of cosmopolitan qualities in the contemporary context of international education.