Hard Sciences Research Articles

Climate Movements virtual exchange as an internationalisation at home initiative in France

Virtual exchange has widened internationalisation to more inclusive internationalisation at home initiatives. This study is set in a higher education context where 122 students from a public university in southwestern France took part in Sharing Perspectives Foundation’s flagship Climate Movements virtual exchange. In this context, L1 French learners of English, who majored in the hard sciences, interacted on a weekly basis with other students worldwide on the sensitive topic of climate change, marking the critical turn of virtual exchange projects (Helm, 2016; O’Dowd, 2016, 2018; Zečević & Milekić, 2022). The data (questionnaire responses, reflective journal entries and interview transcripts) were collected into textual corpora and read for repeated emergent themes through conventional content analysis (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). The perceptions of the participants strongly suggest that Climate Movements virtual exchange is pivotal to internationalisation at home initiatives carried out in English as a second language.

Interstellar exploration: From science fiction to actual technology

The technology for even the most advanced missions in the solar system doesn't need advances in basic science. Traveling through the solar system can be described through what is called ‵hard science fiction’, i.e. science fiction strictly based on scientific knowledge. Interstellar exploration is a completely different matter. Robotic flyby missions to the nearest stars using nanoprobes can be performed using technologies based on known science, while anything beyond this requires advances which we don't know how to implement, or even we are not sure whether they are possible at all. The point applies not only to the technological aspects but even the scientific bases on which the relevant technologies may rest. The missions requiring less scientific-technological advances, are slow missions, like space arks (generation ships) or missions based on hibernation with travel times up to hundred years. To implement both, the uncertainties are more related to the advances in space medicine and biology than in propulsion and physics. The fastest travels allowed by the current interpretations of the relativity theory are relativistic missions in which the time contraction at speeds closing the speed of light is exploited to decrease the travel time for the astronauts, although the travel time seen by those who remain on Earth is close, in years, to the distance traveled expressed in light years. However, the energy required for this type of missions is large and grows drastically with the increase of time contraction.Faster than light travel, which seems to be possible following some interpretations of relativity involving either wormholes or some sort of warp drive, requires substantial advances in fundamental physics. A symptom of this is that the novels dealing with interstellar travels belong more to the space opera – which doesn't follow strict scientific credibility – than to the hard science fiction subgenre. No novel of this kind explains details about how the relevant machinery works, and even less scientifically realistic are the movies, TV series, and videogames of this kind. Moreover, to achieve a travel time allowing to reach distant star systems in reasonable times using warp drives, the authors of Star Trek had to resort to the Warp Factor which is essentially a nonlinear scale. This makes the requirements for FTL travel even more difficult to achieve.

Satisficing Approach to On-Demand Ride Matching

Online ride-hailing platforms have developed into an integral part of the transportation infrastructure in many countries. The primary task of a ride-hailing platform is to match trip requests to drivers in real time. Although both passengers and drivers prefer a prompt pickup to initiate the trips, it is often difficult to find a nearby driver for every passenger. If the driver is far from the pickup point, the passenger may cancel the trip while the driver is heading toward the pickup point. For the platform to be profitable, the trip cancellation rate must be maintained at a low level. We propose a computationally efficient data-driven approach to ride matching, in which a pickup time target is imposed on each trip request and an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the joint probability of all the pickup times meeting the targets. By adjusting pickup time targets individually, this approach may assign more high-value trip requests to nearby drivers, thus boosting the platform’s revenue while maintaining a low cancellation rate. In numerical experiments, the proposed approach outperforms several ride-matching policies used in practice. History: Accepted by Andrea Lodi, Area Editor for Design & Analysis of Algorithms—Discrete. Funding: This work of D. Rong and X. Sun was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant 71971165], the National Key Research and Development Program of China [Grant 2021YFB3301801], the MOE Project of Humanities and Social Science of China [Grant 19YJE630002], and the Soft Science Research Program of Shannxi [Grant 2018KRZ005]. The work of S. He was supported in part by the Singapore Ministry of Education Social Science Research Council [Grant MOE2022-SSRTG-029]. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2021.0210 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2021.0210 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .

The role of teaching subject in teachers’ online identity construction: an interpretative phenomenological approach

ABSTRACT Framed in an interpretative phenomenological approach, this study explored the role of teaching subject (i.e. discipline) in Iranian teachers’ online identity construction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from teachers of hard and soft sciences through semi-structured interviews, reported practices and online interactions. Data analyses showed that the teachers’ online identities involved similarities and differences across their agency, emotion and reflexivity in relation to teaching subject. The authors found that teaching subject influences the relational nature of teachers’ identity construction, yet it mediates more profoundly the teachers’ agency and practices in online teaching. Moreover, the teachers’ emotion and reflexivity were largely constructed in light of their personalised and collegial understandings relevant to sociocultural idiosyncrasies of online education. The findings provide novel implications for characterising teachers’ online identities, which help teacher educators approach online teacher education in light of situated understandings that account for teacher identities in greater depth.

Expressing cause and effect in hard and soft scientific discourse

This study is a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of cause and effect expressions in two corpora that comprise research articles in four hard and four soft disciplines, selected to represent a broad cross-section of academic discourse. Linguistic expressions of cause/effect are hypothesised to deviate in hard and soft sciences, and the differences pertain not only to key lexical categories but also to syntactic patterns. With the ultimate goal of facilitating practitioners of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) and EAP (English for Academic Purposes) to produce discipline-specific materials, which can effectively address the needs of learners of different sciences, this study investigates the productivity of lexical units, representative of cause/effect expressions in hard and soft scientific disciplines, as identified in the Louvain EAP Dictionary, as well as the main grammatical patterns where the former are attested. This paper shows that cause expressions are more common in soft sciences, while the expressions of effect are used in similar proportion in the two categories. As for lexical strategies, soft sciences tend to use more nouns to express cause/effect, while hard sciences rely on prepositions and conjunctions to a larger extent.

Tender Flesh: Theorizing the Hybrid Embodied Poetics of the Asian American Queer Femme in Franny Choi's Soft Science

Abstract: This essay investigates how the grotesque and transgressive aesthetic of Franny Choi's Soft Science (2019) reimagines the Asian American Queer Femme subject's relationship to language, the body, and consciousness. Choi's work unravels this relationship by destabilizing human/nonhuman binary through a polyphonic poetic voice. This act of shapeshifting between humans, cyborgs, cephalopods, and other forms functions as a critique of the oppressive power structures of white supremacy, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity. To theorize her poetics, I foreground the critical lenses of Donna Haraway's posthuman feminism, Lisa Lowe's Asian American aesthetics, Vivian Huang's inscrutability and Mel Chen's queer linguistic animacies in connection with each other as a framework for understanding the hybrid embodiment of the Asian American Queer Femme. Subsequently, I trace Choi's "hybrid embodied poetics"—a hermeneutic that emphasizes her multitudinous lyric voice—primarily within the poems "Glossary of Terms," "Turing Test," "Shokushu Goukan for the Cyborg Soul," "Chi." Furthermore, this essay emphasizes the interrelated nature of the Asian American Queer Femme's embodied experiences and identities, as Choi's work repositions the theoretical frames of Haraway, Lowe, Huang, and Chen in an intersectional dialogue with each other.

Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience.

The question of what generates conscious experience has mesmerized thinkers since the dawn of humanity, yet its origins remain a mystery. The topic of consciousness has gained traction in recent years, thanks to the development of large language models that now arguably pass the Turing test, an operational test for intelligence. However, intelligence and consciousness are not related in obvious ways, as anyone who suffers from a bad toothache can attest-pain generates intense feelings and absorbs all our conscious awareness, yet nothing particularly intelligent is going on. In the hard sciences, this topic is frequently met with skepticism because, to date, no protocol to measure the content or intensity of conscious experiences in an observer-independent manner has been agreed upon. Here, we present a novel proposal: Conscious experience arises whenever a quantum mechanical superposition forms. Our proposal has several implications: First, it suggests that the structure of the superposition determines the qualia of the experience. Second, quantum entanglement naturally solves the binding problem, ensuring the unity of phenomenal experience. Finally, a moment of agency may coincide with the formation of a superposition state. We outline a research program to experimentally test our conjecture via a sequence of quantum biology experiments. Applying these ideas opens up the possibility of expanding human conscious experience through brain-quantum computer interfaces.

The mediating impact of citation scope: Evidence from China's ESI publications

The highly skewed nature of research influence has been widely acknowledged. Among extant studies examining contributing factors, most focus on the hard sciences in developed economies with very few examining the social sciences in emerging powers. The impact of citation scope is likewise left largely underexplored. In this paper, we develop two novel measures of citation scope using geography and research field as metrics and explore their role in boosting academic impact. Our results support geography as a citation scope serving an important pathway through which international collaboration affects academic impact. Such effect increases in prominence in later years. We do not find evidence indicating the mediating effect of research field citation scope on scholarly recognition.

The high energy X-ray probe (HEX-P): the future of hard X-ray dual AGN science

A fundamental goal of modern-day astrophysics is to understand the connection between supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth and galaxy evolution. Merging galaxies offer one of the most dramatic channels for galaxy evolution known, capable of driving inflows of gas into galactic nuclei, potentially fueling both star formation and central SMBH activity. Dual active galactic nuclei (dual AGNs) in late-stage mergers with nuclear pair separations <10 kpc are thus ideal candidates to study SMBH growth along the merger sequence since they coincide with the most transformative period for galaxies. However, dual AGNs can be extremely difficult to confirm and study. Hard X-ray (>10 keV) studies offer a relatively contamination-free tool for probing the dense obscuring environments predicted to surround the majority of dual AGN in late-stage mergers. To date, only a handful of the brightest and closest systems have been studied at these energies due to the demanding instrumental requirements involved. We demonstrate the unique capabilities of HEX-P to spatially resolve the soft and - for the first time - hard X-ray counterparts of closely-separated (∼2″−5″) dual AGNs in the local Universe. By incorporating physically-motivated obscuration models, we reproduce realistic broadband X-ray spectra expected for deeply embedded accreting SMBHs. Hard X-ray spatially resolved observations of dual AGNs—accessible only to HEX-P—will hence transform our understanding of dual AGN in the nearby Universe.

Spearheading a new era in complex colloid synthesis with TPM and other silanes.

Colloid science has recently grown substantially owing to the innovative use of silane coupling agents (SCAs), especially 3-trimethoxysilylpropyl methacrylate(TPM). SCAs were previously used mainly as modifying agents, but their ability to form droplets and condense onto pre-existing structures has enabled their use as a versatile and powerful tool to create novel anisotropic colloids with increasing complexity. In this Review, we highlight the advances in complex colloid synthesis facilitated by the use of TPM and show how this has driven remarkable new applications. The focus is on TPM as the current state-of-the-art in colloid science, but we also discuss other silanes and their potential to make an impact. We outline the remarkable properties of TPM colloids and their synthesis strategies, and discuss areas of soft matter science that have benefited from TPM and other SCAs.

Development of a novel fractional magneto-viscoelastic dynamic model for an adaptive beam featuring functional composite magnetoactive elastomers: Simulations and experimental studies

Recently, the rapid emergence of functional composite magnetoactive elastomers with integrated hard magnetic particles (known as hard magnetoactive elastomers) has attracted significant interest in fields such as soft robotics and material science. It is of paramount importance to develop an efficient model that can accurately predict the nonlinear dynamic behavior of adaptive structures for their practical application and the synthesis of effective control strategies. In this study, a novel nonlinear fractional magneto-viscoelastic model of an adaptive cantilevered beam featuring hard magnetoactive elastomers has been developed. This model effectively characterizes the beam’s nonlinear and rate-dependent response behavior under magnetic stimuli of varying frequencies and magnitudes. Considering the fractional Kelvin-Voigt energy dissipation model and large deformation nonlinearity, the governing equations for the cantilevered hard-magnetic soft beam were derived using the Hamilton principle. The finite difference method, combined with the Galerkin modal decomposition scheme, was subsequently utilized to discretize the time and space domains, respectively. A hardware-in-the-loop experimental framework was finally designed to experimentally investigate the beam’s nonlinear response behavior and validate the simulation results. The simulated nonlinear quasi-static responses of the beam, subjected to magnetic loading up to 30 mT, exhibited excellent agreement with the experimental data collected. Moreover, the simulated dynamic responses of the beam, subjected to various amplitudes of the applied magnetic field and magnetic frequencies up to 2 Hz, were thoroughly investigated. These included time-histories, phase-plane, and hysteretic responses, all demonstrating strong alignment with the experimental observations.

Contrasting the awareness and attitude of French university teachers towards open educational resources sharing across academic fields

ABSTRACT This study examines the disparities in open educational resource sharing among various academic disciplines in French universities. Conducted shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic, it involved an online survey with 947 participants. The findings reveal significant differences in knowledge sharing practices across academic fields. For example, computer science instructors demonstrated greater familiarity with Creative Commons (CC) licences. However, awareness of these licences did not always translate into a willingness to use them. In contrast, law professors, despite being aware of CC licences, were less inclined to share their course materials. The study found that faculty in the hard sciences, as classified by the Becher-Biglan framework, were more inclined to share their resources. These observations highlight the need to consider the academic discipline of instructors when exploring their attitudes towards open education and in formulating policies to enhance the availability of resources on the internet.

Shear-Induced Nonequilibrium Patterns in Lipid Bilayer Membranes Exhibiting Phase Separation.

The nonequilibrium dynamics of a fluid lipid membrane under external stimuli is an important issue that spans disciplines such as soft matter, biophysical chemistry, and interface science. This study investigated the dynamic response of lipid vesicles with order-disorder phase separation, which mimics a plasma membrane heterogeneity, to shear flow. Lipid vesicles were immobilized in a microfluidic chamber, and shear-induced nonequilibrium patterns on the membrane surface were observed by an optical microscope. We found that phase-separated membranes exhibit a dissipative structure of stripe patterns along the vortex flow on the membrane surface, and the number of stripes increased with the flow rate. At a high flow rate, the membrane exhibited a stripe-to-wave transition, where striped domains often migrated and the replacement of two different phases happened at vortex centers with time. We obtained a dynamic phase diagram of the shear-induced wave pattern by changing the flow rate, membrane components, and temperature. These findings could provide insight into the dissipative structures of lipid membranes out of equilibrium and flow-mediated mechanotransduction of biological membranes.

The fluidic memristor as a collective phenomenon in elastohydrodynamic networks

Fluid flow networks are ubiquitous and can be found in a broad range of contexts, from human-made systems such as water supply networks to living systems like animal and plant vasculature. In many cases, the elements forming these networks exhibit a highly non-linear pressure-flow relationship. Although we understand how these elements work individually, their collective behavior remains poorly understood. In this work, we combine experiments, theory, and numerical simulations to understand the main mechanisms underlying the collective behavior of soft flow networks with elements that exhibit negative differential resistance. Strikingly, our theoretical analysis and experiments reveal that a minimal network of nonlinear resistors, which we have termed a ‘fluidic memristor’, displays history-dependent resistance. This new class of element can be understood as a collection of hysteresis loops that allows this fluidic system to store information, and it can be directly used as a tunable resistor in fluidic setups. Our results provide insights that can inform other applications of fluid flow networks in soft materials science, biomedical settings, and soft robotics, and may also motivate new understanding of the flow networks involved in animal and plant physiology.

Application of Catholic Social Teaching in Finance and Management

In dominating narratives, economics has been portrayed as hard science, based on complex mathematical equations and rigid statistical models. It seems to be overlooked that it belongs to the domain of social sciences and that its roots stem from philosophy and ethics. After all, many classical economists were either ethicists (A. Smith) or clergymen (T. Bayes). Today’s managers also seem to be motivated mainly by the desire to increase their company’s profits. However, if managers wish to become both effective and respected leaders for their teams, they should build their power on ethical principles deeply rooted in Catholic Social Teaching. The purpose of the present paper is to attract attention to the relation of economics, management and religion. Behavioral economics and management come to our aid here by emphasizing that, when making decisions related not only to financial markets but also to managerial tasks, what matters is not only factors that are strictly financial, but also those are related to psychology or ethics. Using the example of ethical investing and faith-based funds or stock indexes the Authors show that Christian values and the social teaching of the Catholic Church are still important to some participants in the financial markets.

Ethnomedicine in the USA: Aesthetics of Performance and Organic Wellness as a Posthuman Construct In the ‘Ifa’ Ritual of the Santeria

Performances across time have promoted human wellness, especially as we continue to incorporate the lived experiences of healing rituals into our contemporary artistic practices. Audience members practice good physical, emotional, social, and psychological health through their ability to create an illusion of mental escape, enlightenment, and entertainment. The paper comments on a specific shamanistic practice – “Ifa Ritual,” practiced by the African diaspora of the Americas as a metric for evaluation. I shall explore documented research on the performance expressions noticeable in the Yoruba Ifa ritual exemplary in the Santeria and their communal benefits to Afro-Cubans in the USA. The Afro-Cuban Yorubas called Lucumi are believed to have migrated as slaves from the Yoruba subgroups of Africa to the New World, and there they introduced a cultural practice called the Santeria. The Santeria is an attempt to decolonize the impact of Western religious ideologies on their spiritual and social life by performing Ifa rites as a mode of worship and healing. I interrogate how the performative styles and elements of “Ifa” including the divination techniques contribute to promoting the well-being of contemporary Ifa practitioners. Theoretically, the study considers rituals as a fundamental approach to performance and wellness that seeks to reinforce and provoke discourses in post-humanism. The scope of this study is confined to the branch of humanities and soft sciences devoted to prevalent research on the Yoruba belief system and Lucumi Santeria, aiding the discussion of "Ifa" as a post-humanist construct of performance and wellness.

A holistic experience matters: Factors drive gifted students to recommend residential summer enrichment programs in Saudi Arabia

The study investigates the impact of three aspects of the residential summer enrichment program (RSEP) on gifted students' decision to recommend the program to friends. The research was conducted at a public university in Saudi Arabia, with 356 gifted students from grades nine to 11. The study used Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling to examine the causal connections between these factors and students' intention to advocate for the RSEP. The findings show that students' satisfaction with logistics arrangement, soft-skills program, and science program significantly influences their intention to promote the program. The logistics arrangement had the highest unique contribution to this intention, followed by soft skills and science programs. The study suggests that RSEP can enhance motivation, participation, program quality, and provide valuable input for decision-makers in Saudi Arabia. Enrichment programs should prioritize creating a secure learning environment while considering individual well-being and growth.

Writers' communicative resources for comparing present and past research findings: A pedagogically motivated inquiry into scientists' rhetorical practices

Despite the pivotal role of ‘comparing present and past research findings' (CPPRF) in both softer and harder sciences, scant attention has been directed to how linguistic resources are used in such comparisons in certain applied sciences, particularly Material Science (MS) and Agricultural Science (AS). Based on a genre analysis and interviews with specialist informants, we examined the prevalence of CPPRF, the circumstances involved, and the salient linguistic resources employed by expert writers in the two disciplines. It was found that CPPRF is markedly more prevalent in the ‘Results and Discussion’ sections of the research articles in AS than those in MS. Agricultural scientists use more author prominent citations, especially after alignment verbs, to accentuate the roles of previous researchers while making new knowledge claims. Experts in both fields, however, employ ‘copula-complex preposition’ and ‘copula-adjective-preposition’ structures expressing commonality to explicitly support previous research findings. In cases of divergences, writers draw on comparative adjectives to tacitly avoid direct conflicts with previous researchers' findings in the process of knowledge creation. It is recommended that specific word combinations be highlighted in relation to writers' attempts to generate knowledge via comparisons of present and previous research outcomes, thus implicitly signalling additional contributions of their studies.

«Очевидно, что …»: бустинг как стратегия экспликации уверенности автора в достоверности пропозиции (корпусный анализ жанра «аннотация к научной статье»)

The article analyzes linguistic means used for boosting which is considered a crucial metadiscourse strategy regularly employed in the genre of research article abstracts. The study aims at identifying the types of booster and the frequency of occurrence of boosting markers in Russian-language research article abstracts in the field of soft and hard sciences. The study makes an attempt to reveal differences in the use of these metadiscourse patterns and suggest reasons for the uneven distribution of boosters in the two corpora. The study is based on the assumption that disciplinary conventions affect the choice of rhetorical strategies. The study draws on a corpus of 180 research article abstracts published in 12 soft and hard science journals. The theoretical basis of the study is the taxonomy of metadiscourse markers proposed by Hyland. The findings showed that soft science authors used boosting markers much less frequently than their hard science counterparts. Differences were also revealed in terms of the types of boosting. The results of the analysis confirmed the assumption that boosting as a metadiscourse strategy is determined by disciplinary conventions. The results obtained can be used both by teachers of academic writing and academic writing course designers and become an avenue for further research into metadiscourse as an important rhetorical strategy.

Internationalization and disciplinary differences: Tensions in the academic career in Chilean universities

AbstractThis article broadens the knowledge about the experience of academics in relation to how the internationalization of research has changed in a southern country and tensions that have risen depending on the different disciplines. This work resulted from interviews and documentary data collected mainly through semi‐structured interviews with 57 administrators (including University rectors, provosts, vice‐rectors and deans from multiple disciplines) who had been involved in developing the research strategies. Findings suggest that trends between disciplines differ notoriously. Publishing in foreign countries is more likely to happen to academics from hard sciences. Social sciences and humanities' research activities are often performed in books and book chapters. This translates into an initial disadvantage for social sciences in terms of internationalization since the result of their work is often less visible abroad than scientific indexed papers. This difference might be problematic if used as an indicator of academic productivity and recognition without considering disciplinary differences, especially in countries where research capacities and internationalization are still under development.