Core Of Theory Research Articles

Vagueness and social ontology: Implications of inquiry resistant borderline cases for social ontological theorising

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to introduce the philosophical concept of vagueness and use it to critique the explanatory scope of social ontology as developed by the Cambridge Social Ontology Group (CSOG), and scholars sympathetic to it. Specifically, we will refer to one of its core theories, the theory of social positioning, to formulate our critique. This theory proposes that human beings and artefacts occupy social positions within emerging social totalities by virtue of receiving community accepted, interdependent, rights and obligations. Vagueness, here, is to be understood as a matter of indeterminacy in borderline cases that pose non‐trivial limitations to social positioning. By this we mean to say that there are instances in social ontological theorising that exclude themselves from proper inquiry due to vague terms found in natural languages. As a consequence of these vague terms, theories in social ontology formulated in such languages face limitations when striving for precisification and accuracy of theories. We further argue that these limitations cannot be overcome, but introduce four theories, namely supervaluationsim, epistemicism, truth degree theories and contextualism, which will allow interested readers to understand why these limitations are present. Finally, we consider the controversial theory of ontic vagueness and outline the implications for social ontology.

Active Learning Strategies and Blended Learning Approach for Teaching Under Graduate Software Engineering Course

Abstract: Software Engineering is a core theory course offered in Undergraduate Engineering programmes. It is one of the challenging courses for the teaching faculty. The course includes various systematic approaches, and methods that can be employed for designing, developing, testing and maintaining quality software applications. The course also focuses on the latest tools and technologies that are being practiced in the industry. Effective content delivery methods leveraging active learning strategies for the classical topics have been well researched and established. However, improvement in content delivery plan and execution is required for relatively new and evolving topics like DevOps and version controlling. This paper presents an experimental study of application of the various active learning techniques such as discussion forums, tech talks followed by quiz for such topics. Impact of the application of the improved content delivery plan on the course outcomes attainment by the learners has also been observed and presented. The enhanced approach has proved to improve student learning outcomes, which are measured and presented using a Abirami A.M , Pudumalar S ThiruchadaiPandeeswari 1 2, S 3 Department of Information Technology, Thiagarajar College of Engineering , Madurai, Tamil Nadu 1 abiramiam@tce.edu 2 spmit@tce.edu 3 eshwarimsp@tce.edu standard set of tools and metrics. This paper uses the logistic regression model for the study of impact of blended learning approach on student learning outcomes which produces 60% accuracy. Keywords: DevOps, Software Maintenance, Version Controlling, Software Engineering, Course Outcome Attainment, Active Learning Strategies

Periphery fandom: Contrasting fans’ productive experiences across the globe

The article introduces the concept of periphery fandom, a concept that is new in the debate on consumer culture, to interrogate global fan community productive experiences from various geographical locations. Periphery fandom is defined as a sub-ordinated fan community experience, where members are deprived of access to their objects of fandom. Periphery fandom also refers to a fan productive experience that is detrimental to the fan community ethos. This notion of periphery fandom is underpinned by insights from fandom studies, brand community scholarship, and core and periphery theories. Using adult fans of LEGO as an example, this article demonstrates the character of periphery fandom. By contrasting the data gathered from 2014 to 2019 during UK, Japan, USA, and Brazil LEGO fan events, this study reveals how fans’ divergent productive practices and community experiences are influenced by their geographical location. Moreover, the fan productive experiences from the periphery further hinder their creative expressions and visibility, creating a more fragmented global brand fandom landscape. This study overall advances a contribution to the fandom debates by contrasting fan production and fan brand experiences.

Identity Constructions and Gender in Daisy Hasan’s The To-Let House

This paper is a detailed Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of the novel The To-Let House that represents the indigenous struggles, the politics of identity and the construction of a ‘woman’s identity’ amidst the unsettling environment of violence in the historical context of the North Eastern part of India. The paper would analyse and explore the underlying discourse operating in the novel and investigate the core theories and its impact through the conscious choices of the ‘language in use’ by the author. Daisy Hasan’s The To-Let House is primarily marked with the identity constructions and its gradual evolution. The author not only just unravels the struggles that the characters undergo but also counterfeits a sense of identity instituting it towards one’s self identity. The characters in the novel are unable to affiliate themselves into any one particular cultural identity; rather they constantly are struggling within themselves inwardly, in the midst of the violence surrounding them outwardly. This weakness and inability to assign an identity turns out to be a strong narrative that constructs a powerful discourse highlighting the nuances of ‘belongingness.’

New progresses of studies on essence of meridian-collaterals of traditional Chinese medicine

The meridian-collateral theory introduced in the classic book Huangdi Neijing (The Yellow Emperor's Canon of Internal Medicine,) has been being guiding the clinical diagnosis and treatment of diseases and health preservation by using traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for thousands of years. However, despite of being the core theory of TCM, the meridian-colla-terals and their structural basis have not been scientifically clarified, which has become the "bottleneck" of the inheritance and innovation of TCM. It was reported in 2020 that the micro-channels formed by collagen fiber bundles in the skin and their contained components and the newly found interstitial cell, Telocyte, may be considered to be the ultra-micromorphological basis including their connection with the internal organs. In the present paper, we employed the Telocyte network and its relationships with other structures and cells to interpret, at the cellular level, various meridian hypotheses including 1) neurotheory, 2) humoral circulation theory, 3) biological field hypothesis, 4) fascia theory, 5) immune theory, 6) mast cell theory, 7) meridian-qi, and 8) elusive phenomenon of meridian. The absence of meridian-collaterals in morphology may be related to the difficulty of laboratory sample preparations of Telocyte processes in the continuity and completeness. We also proposed that the future research strategies should be aimed at revealing the morphological structure (including in vitro studies of the isolated and cultured Telocytes), establishment of relevant disease model, and clarification of the interrelation between the Telocyte network and the systems of nerve, blood circulation, immune, endocrine, and connective tissue.

Health and Happiness in the New Urban Agenda: The Central Role of Public Space

The New Urban Agenda—the global urbanization framework agreement adopted by acclamation by all 193 countries of the United Nations—contains no fewer than eight paragraphs on the importance of public space, three of which outline its role in achieving “human health and well-being”, “attractive and liveable cities”, and “physical and mental health”. However, there is an urgent need to translate these and other quality of life aspirations contained in this landmark document into measurable targets, tools, and strategies to achieve outcomes. This paper examines the core theories that connect health and well-being to public space as reflected in the document, surveying some of the most relevant research in the field. It then analyzes the document text to identify a number of potentially useful indicators. Finally, it proposes a framework for data gathering, assessment, and iterative progress in achieving the stated goals, concluding with an overview of emerging research and practice, and proposed next steps.

Following Brodsky. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Apocrypha

The article presents the study of the short film Apocrypha by Andrei Zvyagintsev. The text is aimed at the interpretation of the movie in the context of the problem of memory, which is emphasised in the selected work in the explicit and implicit visual associations with the figure and poetry of Iosif Brodsky. The recognition of these characteristic elements in the structure of Zvyagintsev’s film has the influence on the perception of its meaning, leading the culturally aware recipient towards discovering its broad interpretative potential in view of the Russian literary tradition. The study is conducted using the comparative method of analysis. The core theory which constitutes the methodological foundation of the study is Astrid Erll’s concept of cultural memory expounded as intertextuality, i.e. the continuous building up of layers of texts, which are mediated, as well as her idea of transcultural memory, defined in the first instance as a process of fluctuation between the individual and collective level of remembering. Attention is turned to the motifs, which are characteristic both for Brodsky’s and Zvyagintsev’s poetics, such as the aquatic symbolism, temporal and topographical relationships, chromatography of cold colours etc. The application of the selected methodology in the presented discussion allows for exposing the dynamics of the changing nature of culture, which becomes the container of the social and territorial fluctuations of memory.

Reservoir characteristics and effective development technology in typical low-permeability to ultralow-permeability reservoirs of China National Petroleum Corporation

Low-permeability to ultralow-permeability reservoirs of the China National Petroleum Corporation are crucial to increase the reserve volumes and the production of crude oil in the present and future times. This study aimed to address the two major technical bottlenecks faced by the low-permeability to ultralow-permeability reservoirs by a comprehensive use of technologies and methods such as rate-controlled mercury injection, nuclear magnetic resonance, conventional logging, physical simulation, numerical simulation, and field practices. The reservoir characteristics of low-permeability to ultralow-permeability reservoirs were first analyzed. The water flooding development adjustment mode in the middle and high water-cut stages for the low-permeability to ultralow-permeability reservoirs, where water is injected along the fracture zone and lateral displacement were established. The formation mechanism and distribution principles of dynamic fractures, residual oil description, and expanding sweep volume were studied. The development mode for Type II ultralow-permeability reservoirs with a combination of horizontal well and volume fracturing was determined; this led to a significant improvement in the initial stages of single-well production. The volume fracturing core theory and optimization design, horizontal well trajectory optimization adjustment, horizontal well injection-production well pattern optimization, and horizontal well staged fracturing suitable for reservoirs with different characteristics were developed. This understanding of the reservoir characteristics and the breakthrough of key technologies for effective development will substantially support the oil-gas valent weight of the Changqing Oilfield to exceed 50 million tons per year, the stable production of the Daqing Oilfield with 40 million tons per year (oil-gas valent weight), and the realization of 20 million tons per year (oil-gas valent weight) in the Xinjiang Oilfield.

Correction to: The use of transects for resilient design: core theories and contemporary projects

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-021-01213-x

Measuring biology trainee teachers\u2019 professional knowledge about evolution\u2014introducing the Student Inventory

BackgroundTo teach evolution efficiently teachers must be able to diagnose their students’ ideas and understanding of the phylogeny of organisms. This encompasses different facets of content-specific professional knowledge, that is, knowledge about core ideas and theories, as well as knowledge about respective misconceptions. However, as findings from the field of psychology have shown, diagnostic activities comprise a further facet, namely, teachers’ judgment accuracy. This refers to the question of whether achievement-irrelevant information about the student influences teachers’ diagnoses. Against this background we conducted a study (1) to assess trainee teachers’ abilities to diagnose (a) the scientific correctness of students’ written answers, (b) students’ misconceptions about evolution, and (2) to investigate the interplay of evolution specific and generic facets of professional knowledge during the diagnosis. For this purpose, we applied a digital instrument, the Student Inventory (SI). Using this instrument, the trainee teachers (N = 27) first diagnosed written answers (N = 6) from virtual students regarding their scientific correctness and regarding students’ misconceptions about the natural selection of the peppered moth. Second, to test for judgment accuracy, the trainee teachers received—via the SI—achievement-irrelevant information about each virtual student, that is, the previous result of a multiple-choice questionnaire about evolution, before diagnosing the written answers.ResultsThe trainee teachers were able to distinguish between scientifically correct (90.8%) and scientifically incorrect (91.7%) written answers. Trainee teachers faced problems when diagnosing specific misconceptions categories. Anthropomorphic misconceptions were diagnosed significantly more often (61.1%) than teleological misconceptions (27.8%). The achievement-irrelevant information influenced the trainee teachers’ assessment of written answers (F [1,26] = 5.94, p < .022, η2 = .186) as they scored the written answers higher if the performance in the questionnaire was good and vice versa.ConclusionThe findings indicate that the diagnosis is easier or more difficult depending on the particular misconception category. However, the findings also reveal that, besides the evolution-specific facets of professional knowledge, generic facets interrelate with the quality of the diagnosis result. We conclude from these findings that an integration of evolution-specific and generic knowledge into the education of biology teachers is critical.

Social Representations Theory and Young Africans' Creative Narratives about HIV/AIDS, 1997-2014.

Research on social representations (SRs) has often focused more on categorical than narrative-based representations. However, narratives are considered to play a key role in the organization of social representations. This paper describes an empirical study of some 2,000 creative narratives about HIV written by young Africans from five countries between 1997 and 2014 and examines the theoretical, methodological and applied relevance of SRT for this study and the implications of the study for the intersection between narrative and SRT. The study is unusual within the SR paradigm: it is temporal and cross-national; addresses a subject whose science has evolved over time; and uses creative narratives as its data source. A narrative perspective foregrounds holistic understandings of SRs as systems of thought. Creative narratives fit well within an SR framework. Our triangulating methodologies foreground categorical or narrative dimensions depending on the objectives of specific sub-studies. Central Core Theory provides a framework to articulate stability and change within narrative representations. In creative narrative, objectification also happens at the level of plot and characters, such that dominant cultural narratives can be viewed as a form of hegemonic SR. We link with health communication and embrace more critical streams within SR research.

Corporate Social Responsibility: Insights from Literature Review

Corporate social Responsibility has become a buzz word in recent times. Its worldwide acceptance due to the social consciousness of enterprises coupled with legal orientation in developing countries like India has made it one of the most researched issue for researchers across continents. This paper is an attempt to review the development in the core concepts and theories which have been put forwarded by different researchers during the time period of 2010-2018. The paper undergoes a time series analysis for the selected period evaluating the evolution and impact assessment of CSR on core managerial concepts like marketing, finance and Human Resource management. The researchers after time series analysis have concluded that CSR is age long practice which has changed its orientation with the changes in objectives of business. It can be easily classified in three conceptual eras on the basis of its objectives. In the initial era it was a self-driven practice mainly influenced by the values of promoters of business. In the later stages it can be related with a business strategy of gaining goodwill. In the present era corporates have understood the value of societal obligation and it has again become a self-driven exercise. Further the impact of CSR has coupled with almost all functions of management which can be easily understood from the host of studies conducted during the selected period. The selected studies indicate that CSR has been instrumental in increasing net worth, customer satisfaction and employee retention.

일 상급종합병원의 간호사 임상윤리 교육 사례

Nurses help patients not lose their humanity to the end in the asymmetrical relationship between medical personnel and patients. Because the nurse's frequent judgments at the clinical site are associated with human dignity, the nurse is required to judge and act ethically, and is responsible for making ethical decisions. Therefore, nurses are trained from nursing colleges to have ethical competence, and such training should be carried out continuously and systematically even after graduation. A Medical Center Nursing Department implements various forms of ethical education to improve the ethical capacity of clinical nurses. Education is divided into four types: lectures, e-learning, workshops and clinical ethics counseling. All education was organized around real-life cases to realize that nursing ethics were not far from the actual work site but the closest problem encountered, and the core theories and issues were repeatedly and continuously exposed so that they could permeate into the nurse's ethical decision-making process. Of course, there are still more tasks to be carried out in the future, such as expanding debate-oriented education, promoting clinical ethics counseling, setting up a forum for sharing opinions on ethical issues such as the Ethics Round, but we hope that it will serve as a foundation for the development of better nursing ethics education programs by sharing specific cases of nursing ethics education currently implemented at a tertiary Hospital.

Making Entrepreneurship Education Available to All: Design Principles for Educational Programs Stimulating an Entrepreneurial Mindset

Over the past decade, entrepreneurship education (EE) has increasingly been introduced as a school-wide approach to stimulating an entrepreneurial mindset across various educational levels. We refer to this as “wide approaches to EE”. Wide approaches to EE require education programs that go beyond simply defining entrepreneurial competencies (the “what” question) and ask for learning activities that enable the enfolding, cultivation, and development of such competencies (the “how” question). Although important steps have been made with respect to addressing the “how” question, principles to actually design wide EE programs are scarce. Here, we advance the educational practice and research regarding wide EE by deducing design principles for wide EE programs across educational levels based on core theories in the entrepreneurship literature, including experiential learning, social constructivism, and effectuation theory. The 11 design principles represent the entrepreneurial process, the task, and the context and relationships of wide EE programs, and are discussed in three European cases from different educational levels in order to illustrate how the design principles can be used for understanding wide EE practices. The identified design principles can promote evidence-informed discussion among teachers, curriculum designers, policy-makers, scholars, and others regarding the design, implementation, and investigation of wide EE programs.

Representações sociais de adolescentes e jovens acerca da relação sexual e do uso do preservativo

O presente estudo visa conhecer as Representações Sociais sobre relação sexual e uso de preservativo em adolescentes e jovens. Utilizou-se como referencial teórico a Teoria dimensional ou processual de Denise Jodelet (2001) e Moscovici (2007), a Teoria do Núcleo Central de Jean-Claude Abric (2001) e a Teoria Societal de Willem Doise (2002). Utilizou-se a pesquisa quali-quantitativa de carácter exploratória. A amostra foi não-probabilística por conveniência constituída por 79 estudantes de duas escolas públicas. Os participantes responderam a um questionário e a um Teste de Associação Livre de Palavras com três estímulos indutores: sexo, sexo sem camisinha e sexo com camisinha. O dados foram tratados com auxílio do software IBM SPSS Statistic e openEvoc 0.84. A análise dos resultados mostrou que os adolescentes e jovens relacionam sexo com prazer, intimidade e amor e o não uso do preservativo com perigo, gravidez, doença, HIV. Concluíu-se que os adolescentes e jovens possuem informações sobre os perigos do não uso do preservativo, porém, para eles o uso de preservativo diminui o prazer sexual.

The use of transects for resilient design: core theories and contemporary projects

The concept of the transect is derived from a scientific method of investigating a sequence of environments by sampling geographical cross-sections of the target region. Many environmental theorists, including Patrick Geddes and Ian McHarg, have adopted the transect to pursue an ideal relationship between nature and human settlement. Transect planning provides an essential perspective on and transdisciplinary platform for mitigating today's urban problems and social changes. Transects have been especially widely used in urban resilience projects designed to prepare for future uncertainties stemming from climate change. In this context, this study reveals the strengths of the transect method for urban resilience and landscape sustainability in the current era. This study first examines the theoretical background of the transect as evidenced in the history of environmental planning, including in the work of Patrick Geddes and Ian McHarg, as well as the study of contemporary urbanism. Additionally, this work describes the distinctive characteristics of the transect method through an analysis of recent urban resilience projects. Historically, transect use has furthered the pursuit of a synergistic relationship between nature and human beings. Leading theorists have adopted different perspectives on the environment and pursued various philosophies of urban planning. Many urban and landscape projects have actively taken advantage of the transect method and its foundation in ecological thinking. Through an examination of certain contemporary urban resilience projects, the main characteristics of the transect method can be deduced, including: (1) multiscale and multidirectional analysis, (2) spatiotemporal design, and (3) heterogeneous patterning. This method-oriented research offers new insights into the current study of landscape ecology, landscape architecture, and environmental planning, and reveals the potential of the transect method for resilient design.

Dutch Disease Effects in the Azerbaijan Economy: Results of Multivariate Linear Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) Estimations

This paper investigates the increased role of extractive industry, particularly oil and gas, within the Dutch disease model between 2000-2018 in the Azerbaijan economy. Dutch disease phenomenon befalls when the national economy produces and exports a single commodity or a particular sector becomes the booming sector. Increased exports of particular goods and spendings of the accumulated mineral revenue appreciate the national currency, decreasing the competitiveness and thus the production or export volume of the non-booming sectors. Azerbaijan is an oil and gas-rich country which naturally actualizes the existence of Dutch disease syndrome . Therefore, the purpose of this research is to separately reveal the Dutch disease effects of resource movement and spending effects based on the theoretical frame­ work constructed from the core theory. The paper contains a comprehensive literature review and overall macroeconomic screening of the Azerbaijan economy to describe the preconditions of Dutch disease. Then, the study employs 42 multivariate linear ordinary least squares (OLS) estimations. The estimated models illustrate the presence of indirect de-industrialization (one form of resource movement effect) and the spending effect of the Dutch disease hypothesis. However, the paper does not find a direct negative influence of booming sectors on aggregated lagging (i.e., manufacturing and agriculture) and non-tradable sectors (services). Moreover, va­riables such as oil price growth rates, real effective exchange rate (REER), nominal effective exchange rate (NEER), and economic crisis periods failed to significantly explain the employment and real wages dynamics. However, these variables described certain influence channels in output and returns on capital growth rates. This paper sheds light on the interconnections between the Azerbaijan economy’s labor resources, government spending, and monetary channels. These interconnections indicate that the Dutch disease hypothesis holds true for Azerbaijan. Of the estimated OLS coefficients, 90.5% were highly stable, which suggests that the results are reliable. This study mainly tests the general theoretical expectations of the original Dutch disease model and presents a common ground to conceptualize the possible harmful effects of the booming oil and gas sectors in Azerbaijan. Any causal derivations should be handled carefully.

TCM network pharmacology: A new trend towards combining computational, experimental and clinical approaches.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is a precious treasure of the Chinese nation and has unique advantages in the prevention and treatment of diseases. The holistic view of TCM coincides with the new generation of medical research paradigm characterized by network and system. TCM gave birth to a new method featuring holistic and systematic "network target", a core theory and method of network pharmacology. TCM is also an important research object of network pharmacology. TCM network pharmacology, which aims to understand the network-based biological basis of complex diseases, TCM syndromes and herb treatments, plays a critical role in the origin and development process of network pharmacology. This review introduces new progresses of TCM network pharmacology in recent years, including predicting herb targets, understanding biological foundation of diseases and syndromes, network regulation mechanisms of herbal formulae, and identifying disease and syndrome biomarkers based on biological network. These studies show a trend of combining computational, experimental and clinical approaches, which is a promising direction of TCM network pharmacology research in the future. Considering that TCM network pharmacology is still a young research field, it is necessary to further standardize the research process and evaluation indicators to promote its healthy development.

Self-directed learning among primary health care doctors: an analysis in light of the theory of social representations

Abstract: Introduction: In a scenario of a great information availability, the production of scientific knowledge in medicine has been increasingly accelerated. The way the medical professional perceives and directs their acquisition of knowledge still lacks national studies, particularly in times of easily accessible internet. Objective: To analyze the social representations of physicians working in Primary Health Care (PHC) teams about self-directed learning. Method: This is a qualitative-quantitative study based on Moscovici’s Social Representations Theory, with a structural approach to Abric’s Central Core Theory, conducted in three municipalities of the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Semi-structured interviews were conducted on the subject, which were recorded and transcribed. The freely evoked words that emerged from the inducing term “medical self-learning” were analyzed with the aid of EVOC® software through the four-quadrant chart and CHIC® software analyzed the similarity. Content analysis was performed for the participants’ speeches. Results: Fifty interviews were carried out and the freely evoked words that possibly constitute the core of the representations were “knowledge”, “dedication”, “study”, “reading”, “need”, contrasting “research” and “book”. Conclusion: The results showed that the learners’ characteristics, practice as a learning locus as opposed to theory, associated with the time barrier, define the core content of the social representation of the participating physicians. In this assessed context, PHC reinforces its importance as a scenario for medical self-learning.

Research on the Training Path of Professional Core Literacy Matching Ability of Private Universities under the Background of New Liberal Arts

Guided by the core theory of comprehensively launching the new liberal arts construction conference, aiming at cultivating applied and compound talents, based on the perspective of OBE teaching theory, integrating the characteristics of our own university, taking the characteristics of economic statistics as an example, this paper constructs the core literacy index matching with the core literacy of Chinese students’ development, and studies the matching curriculum and education path. Reconstruct the design in the aspects of basic knowledge, professional quality, application of statistical tools, practical innovation and cross-cultural cooperation, form a training path framework, enable students to form the ability to match the professional core quality in the new liberal arts era, then the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation matrix is further constructed, and the index evaluation system based on the development of core literacy is established. Finally, the research results are discussed.