The entrepreneurial university and academic discourses: The meta‐synthesis of Higher Education articles

The innovative teaching, knowledge and technology production and societal service activities of academics are largely discussed within the entrepreneurial university discourse in Higher Education journals. Therefore, this research focuses on a meta‐synthesis of Higher Education articles to better understand the concepts of the entrepreneurial university and entrepreneurial academic. After the systematic elimination based on keywords and titles, 25 articles have been selected from the top 10 Higher Education journals in the SCImago Journal Rankings. Content analysis was performed on these articles to highlight the common operational areas in entrepreneurial universities and activities of entrepreneurial academics. The meta‐synthesis shows that, both for universities and academics, entrepreneurship is overwhelmingly characterised by the commercialisation of scholarly activities that enrich institutional income revenue as well as academics’ personal income. However, such an approach can distance universities from their mission of public good; so Higher Education administrators should create mechanisms that would allow both to take place in a balanced way.     

How much effort is needed to keep up with the literature relevant for primary care?

OBJECTIVES: Medicine must keep current with the research literature, and keeping current requires continuously updating the clinical knowledge base (i.e., references that provide answers to clinical questions). The authors estimated the volume of medical literature potentially relevant to primary care published in a month and the time required for physicians trained in medical epidemiology to evaluate it for updating a clinical knowledge base. METHODS: We included journals listed in five primary care journal review services (ACP Journal Club, DynaMed, Evidence-Based Practice, Journal Watch, and QuickScan Reviews). Finding little overlap, we added the 2001 "Brandon/Hill Selected List of Print Books and Journals for the Small Medical Library." We counted articles (including letters, editorials, and other commentaries) published in March 2002, using bibliographic software where possible and hand counting when necessary. For journals not published in March 2002, we reviewed the nearest issue. Five primary care physicians independently evaluated fifty randomly selected articles and timed the process. RESULTS: The combined list contained 341 currently active journals with 8,265 articles. Adjusting for publication frequency, we estimate 7,287 articles are published monthly in this set of journals. Physicians trained in epidemiology would take an estimated 627.5 hours per month to evaluate these articles. CONCLUSIONS: To provide practicing clinicians with the best current evidence, more comprehensive and systematic literature surveillance efforts are needed.     

Investigating Turkish Primary School Students’ Interest in Science by Using Their Self-Generated Questions

This paper reports on an attempt to investigate Turkish primary school students’ interest in science by using their self-generated questions. We investigated students’ interest in science by analyzing 1704 self-generated science-related questions. Among them, 826 questions were submitted to a popular science magazine called Science and Children. Such a self-selected sample may represent a group of students who have a higher level of motivation to seek sources of information outside their formal education and have more access to resources than the students of low social classes. To overcome this problem, 739 students were asked to write a question that they wanted to learn from a scientist and as a result 878 questions were gathered. Those students were selected from 13 different schools at 9 cities in Turkey. These schools were selected to represent a mixture of socioeconomic areas and also to cover different students’ profile. Students’ questions were classified into two main categories: the field of interest and the cognitive level of the question. The results point to the popularity of biology, astrophysics, nature of scientific inquiry, technology and physics over other science areas, as well as indicating a difference in interest according to gender, grade level and the setting in which the questions were asked. However, our study suggests that only considering questions submitted to informal learning environments, such as popular science magazines or Ask-A-Scientist Internet sites has limitations and deficiencies. Other methodologies of data collection also need to be considered in designing teaching and school science curriculum to meet students’ needs and interest. The findings from our study tend to challenge existing thinking from other studies. Our results show that self-generated questions asked in an informal and a formal setting have different patterns. Some aspects of students’ self-generated questions and their implications for policy, science curriculum reform and teaching are discussed in this paper.     

Space Communications

THE INTELSAT GLOBAL SATELLITE SYSTEM edited by Joel Alper and Joseph N. Pelton (American Institute of Aeronautices and Astronautics, Inc., 1633 Broadway, New York 10019---$45.00)

SPACE, EARTH, AND COMMUNICATION by Edward Ploman (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books/-Greenwood Press, 1984---$27.50)     

Privacy-preserving multi-criteria collaborative filtering

Privacy-preserving collaborative filtering schemes focus on eliminating the privacy threats inherent in single preference values, and the privacy risks in the multi-criteria preference domain are disregarded. In this work, we introduce randomized perturbation-based privacy-preserving approaches for multi-criteria collaborative filtering systems. Initially, the privacy protection methods efficiently used in traditional single-criterion systems are adapted onto multi-criteria ratings. However, these systems require intelligent protection mechanisms that are flexible and adapting to the structure of each sub-criterion. To achieve such a goal, we introduce a novel privacy-preserving protocol by adapting an entropy-based randomness determination procedure that can recover accuracy losses. The proposed protocol adjusts privacy-controlling parameters concerning the information inherent in each criterion. We experimentally evaluate the proposed schemes on three subsets of Yahoo!Movies multi-criteria preference dataset to demonstrate the effects of the proposed privacy-preserving schemes on both user privacy levels and prediction accuracy for differing sparsity rates. According to the obtained experimental outcomes, the proposed entropy-based privacy-preserving scheme can produce significantly more accurate predictions while maintaining an identical level of privacy provided by the traditional privacy protection scenario. The experimental results also confirm that the novel entropy-based privacy-preserving scheme maintains the confidentiality of personal preferences without severely compromising prediction accuracy.     

Shareholder communication and issue salience: corporate responses to ‘social’ shareholder activism

This study focuses on corporate engagement when shareholder activists raise concerns about social issues during annual shareholder meetings. Building upon strategic communication, social activism, and management research, the study combines Stakeholder Salience Theory (SST) and Issues Management Theory to explain corporate responses to shareholder activism. The researchers constructed a dataset of 844 shareholder actions in the U.S., all concerning environmental issues from 2006 to 2014. The analyses revealed that the urgency of the shareholder requests was the main driver of saliency. Moreover, shareholder activism strategies that engage corporations in private negotiations appeared to be effective in eliciting positive corporate responses. The findings contribute to applied communication theory and research by advancing SST with an issues management perspective in the context of shareholder activism.     

Young Children’s Positive and Negative Parasocial Relationships with Media Characters

There is a scarcity of research on how young children form short- and long-term emotional connections with popular media characters. Preexisting research on young children’s parasocial relationships (PSR) with media personae has traditionally operationally defined PSR exclusively in terms of friendship and focused on television characters. However, a growing body of research suggests the need for a wider survey of children’s media platforms. Scholarship also actually points to two distinct constructs of PSR: positive PSR (friendly feelings or amicability) and negative PSR (unfriendly feelings or antipathy). This study engaged 88 children ages 5–7 in open- and closed-ended questions designed to measure both positive and negative PSR. Our research reveals a more nuanced understanding of young children’s PSR.     

Investigating and counteracting popularity bias in group recommendations

Popularity bias is an undesirable phenomenon associated with recommendation algorithms where popular items tend to be suggested over long-tail ones, even if the latter would be of reasonable interest for individuals. Such intrinsic tendencies of the recommenders may lead to producing ranked lists, in which items are not equally covered along the popularity tail. Although some recent studies aim to detect such biases of traditional algorithms and treat their effects on recommendations, the concept of popularity bias remains elusive for group recommender systems. Therefore, in this study, we focus on investigating popularity bias from the view of group recommender systems, which aggregate individual preferences to achieve recommendations for groups of users. We analyze various state-of-the-art aggregation techniques utilized in group recommender systems regarding their bias towards popular items. To counteract possible popularity issues in group recommendations, we adapt a traditional re-ranking approach that weighs items inversely proportional to their popularity within a group. Also, we propose a novel popularity bias mitigation procedure that re-ranks items by incorporating their popularity level and estimated group ratings in two distinct strategies. The first one aims to penalize popular items during the aggregation process highly and avoids bias better, while the second one puts more emphasis on group ratings than popularity and achieves a more balanced performance regarding conflicting goals of mitigating bias and boosting accuracy. Experiments performed on four real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that both strategies are more efficient than the adapted approach, and empowering aggregation techniques with one of these strategies significantly decreases their bias towards popular items while maintaining reasonable ranking accuracy.     

The determinants of student achievement in Turkey

Recent achievement test results show that Turkish students have been performing poorly compared to students from other countries. Using science literacy results from the PISA 2006 survey, we aim to measure the determinants of student achievement in Turkey within the education production function framework. We find that program types have large effects on student achievement. Since many students are allocated across program types as a result of a centralized exam, we try to control for past academic achievement and also for differences in the average socioeconomic background of students in a given school. The results indicate that students cluster in schools according to their socioeconomic background, and previous academic record is important, however, the effects of program types persist. Policies to augment socioeconomic background, such as conditional cash transfers and lifelong learning programs that prioritize parents will increase educational output.     

Polynomial based differential quadrature method for numerical solution of nonlinear Burgers' equation

Nonlinear Burgers' equation is solved using polynomial based differential quadrature method (PDQ). Numerical simulations are studied for three well known test problems, namely shock-like solution, travelling wave and sinusoidal disturbance solutions of Burgers' equation. Obtained numerical results of the first and the third test problems are compared with some earlier numerical results. Discrete root mean square error norm and maximum error norm are computed for the first two test problems and a comparison with some earlier works is given.