Interdisciplinary Subject Research Articles

Knowledge Production: Analysing Gender- and Country-Dependent Factors in Research Topics through Term Communities

Scholarly publications are among the most tangible forms of knowledge production. Therefore, it is important to analyse them, amongst other features, for gender or country differences and the incumbent inequalities. While there are many quantitative studies of publication activities and success in terms of publication numbers and citation counts, a more content-related understanding of differences in the choice of research topics is rare. The present paper suggests an innovative method of using term communities in co-occurrence networks for detecting and evaluating the gender- and country-specific distribution of topics in research publications. The method is demonstrated with a pilot study based on approximately a quarter million of publication abstracts in seven diverse research areas. In this example, the method validly reconstructs all obvious topic preferences, for instance, country-dependent language-related preferences. It also produces new insight into country-specific research focuses. It emerges that in all seven subject areas studied, topic preferences are significantly different depending on whether all authors are women, all authors are men, or there are female and male co-authors, with a tendency of male authors towards theoretical core topics, of female authors towards peripheral applied topics, and of mixed-author teams towards modern interdisciplinary topics.

Imagining a Place for Sustainability Management: An Early Career Call for Action

Imagining a Place for Sustainability Management: An Early Career Call for Action

Researches Advanced in the Development and Application of Information Extraction

Natural language processing (NLP) is an interdisciplinary subject of linguistics and computer science, which processes the language used for human communication into a machine language that can be understood by machines.The task of information extraction is to obtain target information accurately and quickly from a large amount of data and improve the utilization of information. With the rapid development of Internet applications, how to quickly and accurately analyze the really useful information in these text data is particularly critical and urgent. Information extraction has become an important branch of natural language processing. Thanks to the rapid development of deep learning, the performance of information extraction has made breakthroughs in recent years. In this paper, based on the detailed literature analysis, this paper first review the development of information extraction. Secondly, the research progress of key technologies of information extraction is summarized from four aspects: named entity recognition, anaphora resolution, relationship extraction and event extraction. Finally, we analyze some main problems of information extraction and predict the research trend of information extraction.

Editorial

The main aim of the journal is to analyse scientific and practical problems in the scope of European integration processes. The articles are brought under three wide, multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary themes. These are Social Evolution of Europe (e. g. social equality, migration, cross-cultural aspects, education management, etc.), Economics of the European Union (e. g. economic growth, competitiveness, financial aspects, comparative analysis of economic situation of countries, etc.) as well as Managerial Aspects of European Integration (business management, innovations, human capital development aspects, intellectual capital, etc.).

Dynamic Generation of Knowledge Graph Supporting STEAM Learning Theme Design

Instructional framework based on a knowledge graph makes up for the interdisciplinary theme design ability of teachers in a single discipline, to some extent, and provides a curriculum-oriented theme generation path for STEAM instructional design. This study proposed a dynamic completion model of a knowledge graph based on the subject semantic tensor decomposition. This model can be based on the tensor calculation of multi-disciplinary curriculum standard knowledge semantics to provide more reasonable STEAM project-based learning themes for teachers of those subjects. First, the STEAM multi-disciplinary knowledge semantic dataset was generated through the course’s standard text and open-source encyclopedia data. Next, based on the semantic tensor decomposition of specific STEAM topics, the dynamic generation of knowledge graphs was realized, providing interdisciplinary STEAM learning topic sequences for teachers of a single discipline. Finally, the application experiment of generating STEAM learning themes proved the effectiveness of our model.

Factors Impacting the Sustainable Development of Professional Learning Communities in Interdisciplinary Subjects in Chinese K-12 Schools: A Case Study

Professional learning communities are recognized as one of the most effective approaches for promoting the professional development of teachers. In the current complex and rapidly changing era, to facilitate the implementation of interdisciplinary curricula, Chinese schools have made tremendous efforts to enhance teacher professional development, particularly by establishing professional learning communities. Aiming to understand the operation of professional learning communities in interdisciplinary subjects in Chinese K-12 schools and to examine factors impacting the sustainable development of these professional learning communities, we conducted a case study on professional learning communities in the interdisciplinary subject of Education for International Understanding in Chengdu Horsens Primary School. As part of this study, we interviewed the principal, course director, seed teachers and teachers participating in the selected case. The research results demonstrated that the major factors impacting the sustainable development of professional learning communities in interdisciplinary subjects in Chinese K-12 schools include school structures and policies, school leadership, teachers’ professionalism and learning capacity and their sense of community. In addition, compared to traditional subject-based professional learning communities in China, professional learning communities in interdisciplinary subjects highlight a sense of community, which presents three distinctive features: a conflict-inclusive atmosphere, the coexistence of individual and shared visions and an emotional bonding identity. These three features also have a considerable impact on the sustainable development of professional learning communities in interdisciplinary subjects in Chinese K-12 schools.

Measures to address the stalled development of health law education in Chinese universities

Health law education, an important part of global health education, is beneficial for both medical and law schools. This field can help lawyers and policy makers to develop their careers and equip traditional health professionals, such as doctors and nurses, with a basic knowledge of health law. However, unlike in western universities, health law education in China is still at its infant stage and, as such, lacks a systematic pedagogical approach among institutions of higher education in China. Considering the advancements in the field of health law education, this study systematically reviews the status of health law education in institutions of higher learning in China and suggests ways to make the pedagogical approach more consistent. This systematic review revealed that, between 2012 and 2021, major law schools and medical schools that have developed the subject of health law education in China lack consensus on the aim, scope, mode, and methods of health law education. The first problem is that Chinese universities are unable to agree on how to classify the subject of health law. Another set of problems relate to institutions themselves. Not only do universities lack qualified health law faculty, but they also rely on relatively uninspiring teaching materials. This leads to ineffective, generic pedagogical approaches in both medical and law schools. These problems leave future lawyers, future doctors and nurses unclear about their choices for health law study at the graduate level and their ultimate career development. We therefore propose four preliminary solutions to continue to develop this new interdisciplinary subject—health law education—in Chinese universities: clearly classify the subject of health law, equip the health law field with more professional textbooks, enact joint degree programs between medical schools and law schools, and establish a health law research center in either law schools or medical schools.

Agama Digital (Digital Religion) dan Relevansinya Terhadap Studi Agama Interdisipliner: Sebuah Tinjauan Literatur

This article aimed to offer another side of the discussion concerning digital religion commonly understood as an interaction between technological users and religious phenomena on the screen or electronic devices, Digital Religion served as an interdisciplinary subject inviting multiple perspectives to reveal a more profound and comprehensive view regarding religious communities, expressions, and symbols in the digital world. This research was conducted as a literature review combining and analyzing massive lists of reputable references related to the topic. In addition, this research also utilized a content analysis method to summarize crucial ideas and information needed by the study. This paper concluded that Digital Religion emphasized the interaction between technology users and religious expressions in the digital world assisted by internet access. These interactions gave birth to new religious views, systems, and symbols different from conventional religious discourse. Moreover, it is apparent that Digital Religion was able to attract other branches of science to work together responding to issues, realizing it as an interdisciplinary study.

Research on the model of high robustness computational optical imaging system

Computational optical imaging is an interdisciplinary subject integrating optics, mathematics, and information technology. It introduces information processing into optical imaging and combines it with intelligent computing, subverting the imaging mechanism of traditional optical imaging which only relies on orderly information transmission. To meet the high-precision requirements of traditional optical imaging for optical processing and adjustment, as well as to solve its problems of being sensitive to gravity and temperature in use, we establish an optical imaging system model from the perspective of computational optical imaging and studies how to design and solve the imaging consistency problem of optical system under the influence of gravity, thermal effect, stress, and other external environment to build a high robustness optical system. The results show that the high robustness interval of the optical system exists and can effectively reduce the sensitivity of the optical system to the disturbance of each link, thus realizing the high robustness of optical imaging.

Preface: 3rd International Conference on the Frontiers of Innovative Economics and Management (FIEM 2022)

The volume is the collection of papers presented as the 3rd International Conference on the Frontiers of Innovative Economics and Management (FIEM 2022), which was held on September 29-30, 2022. It was co-organized by Suzhou Wenyu Information Technology Co., Ltd. and Suzhou Branch of Zewang Investment Co., Ltd.
 This event provides an excellent international forum for sharing knowledge, the result of innovative research and methodology both in theory and practice in several scopes such as economics, business, management and related interdisciplinary subjects. The conference aims to provide an interactive platform to the researchers and practitioners from both academic societies as well as industry to meet and share cutting-edge development.
 This FIEM 2022 received 124 manuscripts, and more than 40 submissions had been accepted by our reviewers. By submitting a paper to FIEM, the authors agreed to the review process and understood that papers undergo a peer-review process. Manuscripts were reviewed by appropriately qualified experts in the field selected by the conference committee, who gave detailed comments and-if the submission was accepted the authors would submit a revised version that considered this feedback. All papers were reviewed using a double-blind review process: authors declared their names and affiliations in the manuscript for the reviewers to see, but reviewers did not know each other’s identities, nor did the authors receive information about who had reviewed their manuscript. 
 Xixi Zhou
 Soochow University
 Editor of FIEM 2022 
 Yedda Austin
 New York University, USA
 Editor of FIEM 2022

Thought and Metaphor: Does Philosophy Teaching Clash or Collaborate with Literary Education?

Abstract M. Mahlios, D. Massengill-Show and A. Bary in the article “Making Sense of Teaching through Metaphors: a Review across the Studies” investigated how metaphors influence teachers approach to teaching, curriculum and their work with pupil (Mahlios, Massengill-Show, Barry 2010: 49-71). The aim of this thesis is rather different: to investigate the relation between the thought (concept) an the image described by words (metaphor). The question would be asked: is it possible such a phenomenon as the literary argument, which was formulated by Jacques Derrida in discussion with Habermas. If it is possible, next question; how it is possible? How can the consequences of this clash between metaphor and concept be reflected in the philosophy of education? Can literature as interdisciplinary subject on equal grounds be included into philosophy curriculum? Can philosophy on equal grounds be included into literature curriculum? If not - what is the reason for their separation? If on the contrary on chooses the opposite premise that they can be included - what are the philosophical suppositions for their meeting? This article tries to overview the problem from the historical perspective and to suggest the theoretical approach relying on Jacques Derrida conception.1

Reshaping Teaching for Sustainability in Business Engineering – A Pilot Study on Students' Outlooks and Learning Expectations

In the context of the rapid pace of technological advance, increasing technological interconnection and the shift toward sustainable economies, education is required to provide graduates with knowledge and skills to address the complex challenges posed by the fast-moving, globalized and interconnected world. Engineering education has gained particular importance, going beyond the technical knowledge and preparing students for entrepreneurial actions through the acquisition of hands-on, operative capabilities to drive new business models, integrating complex issues of technological change and digitization, environmental and socio-economic concerns. The authors have undertaken a quantitative survey aiming at investigating the students’ outlook on modern sustainable development concerns and collecting relevant learning needs in a wide range of sustainability-related directions. The survey results stressed improvement solutions to augment teaching for sustainability in the case of business engineering areas such as a) embedding interdisciplinary topics into existing curricula linked to SDGs instead of creating new disciplines; b) developing and leveraging core shared values of citizenship for further learning across the entire curriculum and emphasizing the interrelatedness of knowledge, skills, attitudes and values; c) facilitating interdisciplinary knowledge for understanding and solving complex business and engineering problems; d) enhancing students’ intellectual maturity and critical thinking to act in responsible ways, coping with new realities and demands. Finally, the authors shared their views on the need to provide tailored content and quality information with differentiated knowledge about topics from different areas which might induce transformational change in local curricula to foster a sustainable mindset of graduates.

PROFESSIONAL COMPETENCES AND CONTENT OF THE UNDEGRADUATE PUBLIC HEALTH PROGRAMMES IN EUROPE

Sufficient number of competent public health professionals are an important prerequisit for the normalfunctioning of the health systems. At present, the number and type of institutions carrying out undergraduate educationand training in public health varies broadly both in Europe and the USA. There is a lack of clarity on how much therequirements for professional public health competencies are covered by the content of undergraduate public healthprograms in Europe. Purpose: To analyse the content of Bachelor Public Health programmes in Europe, in relation tothe requirements for professional competences introduced by ASPHER in 2014 (Association of Schools of PublicHealth in the European Region). Methods: An online questionnaire was developed and distributed via the Internetplatform Google Forms to 214 universities in Europe. The electronic survey included 50 questions clarifyingavailability of study subjects and topics from 7 main areas of competences proposed by ASPHER: Methods in PublicHealth; Population Health and Determinants; Health Policy; Economics and Management; Health Education andHealth Promotion; Interdisciplinary subjects; Practical Training and Others. Similar information was extracted from theeducational documentation accessible from the web pages of 74 higher educational institutions offering undergraduateprograms in public health from 19 European countries. Results: Information for 59 undergraduate public healthprogrammes was retrieved, 45 from west and 14 from east Europe. Subjects related to “Health Inequalities”, “GlobalHealth”, “Information Technologies”, “Ageing”, “Leadership”, “Genomics” are available in less than 50% of theprogrammes in both west and east Europe. There is a clear difference between west and east programmes in someaspects. In the central focus of training in PH in Bulgaria and the countries from Eastern Europe are the specializedprevention disciplines related to hygiene and epidemiology of communicable diseases and a considerable number ofclinical disciplines. The latter are less presented in the training in Western European programmes, which are moreoriented towards health policy and management. Conclusions: There is a significant variation in the content and as aresult the professional competences provided by the undergraduate PH education programmes in Europe. Both westand east European undergraduate PH programmes fail to address adequately the present global challenges in the areastarting with existing health inequalities. Recommendation: There is an urgent need for regulation of public health as abasic regulated health profession in the European Union, which will entail standardization of the content of thebachelor education and will stimulate the recognition and the importance of the profession across Europe as well.

Concepts and conjectures concerning predatory performance of myxobacteria.

Myxobacteria are excellent model organisms for investigation of predator–prey interactions and predatory shaping of microbial communities. This review covers interdisciplinary topics related to myxobacterial predation and provides current concepts and challenges for determining predatory performance. Discussed topics include the role of specialized metabolites during predation, genetic determinants for predatory performance, challenges associated with methodological differences, discrepancies between sequenced and environmental myxobacteria, and factors that influence predation.

Agency is an illusion

This article investigates student teachers’ perceptions and experiences in teacher education regarding codetermination and participation as a part of education for democracy and citizenship, along with how they visualize their future teaching in this interdisciplinary theme as teachers in schools. The data material includes 16 extensive interviews with six student teachers in their final year of teacher education in Norway. The results demonstrate a discrepancy between their perceptions and praxis concerning participation. First, the student teachers in their last year of teacher education felt the ability to participate in and through their education was present, but they chose not to take advantage of this possibility. They underlined the importance of participation and agency in education for democracy but did not seem to assign the same importance to their involvement in education. Second, when visualizing how to teach democracy and citizenship in schools, they suggested facilitating pupils’ self-determination in situations where the pupils’ decisions and participation do not change or impact anything. In so doing, they described participation and agency as an illusion; something that is important, necessary, and valuable but with no practical implications. The student teachers seemed to transfer this same illusion of pupils’ agency and participation in their planned teaching in the future.

Monitoring nature's calendar from space: Emerging topics in land surface phenology and associated opportunities for science applications.

Vegetation phenology has been viewed as the nature's calendar and an integrative indicator of plant-climate interactions. The correct representation of vegetation phenology is important for models to accurately simulate the exchange of carbon, water, and energy between the vegetated land surface and the atmosphere. Remote sensing has advanced the monitoring of vegetation phenology by providing spatially and temporally continuous data that together with conventional ground observations offers a unique contribution to our knowledge about the environmental impact on ecosystems as well as the ecological adaptations and feedback to global climate change. Land surface phenology (LSP) is defined as the use of satellites to monitor seasonal dynamics in vegetated land surfaces and to estimate phenological transition dates. LSP, as an interdisciplinary subject among remote sensing, ecology, and biometeorology, has undergone rapid development over the past few decades. Recent advances in sensor technologies, as well as data fusion techniques, have enabled novel phenology retrieval algorithms that refine phenology details at even higher spatiotemporal resolutions, providing new insights into ecosystem dynamics. As such, here we summarize the recent advances in LSP and the associated opportunities for science applications. We focus on the remaining challenges, promising techniques, and emerging topics that together we believe will truly form the very frontier of the global LSP research field.

Dealing with the Social-Ecological Obstacle: Review of Decision-Making Approaches in Marine Management

Occupying the same crucial position as land resources, ecological resources originate from the marine system nourish various aspects of human welfare and the world economy. It is significant to apply efficient decision-making approaches, which assist with the achievements of sustainable development and environmental protection. This paper aims to review decision-making approaches in marine management and present a comprehensive bibliometric study. To achieve this goal, bibliometric analysis is used to analyze the current status and emerging trends in this field, including the cluster network, the collaboration network, and burst detection. The results show that the number of publications in this field has increased rapidly, and it has become an increasing interdisciplinary research subject. Besides, marine conservation is the largest clusterand the USA is the most productive country in marine management research and the marine policy and NOAA are the most productive journal and institution, respectively. Furthermore, “Diversity,” “Management,” and “Population” are the most influential keywords, and “People” and “Public participation” are the emerging trends in decision-making and marine management. Our work clarifies where we are now in terms of marine management and decision-making and how do they serve each other to achieve sustainable development. More importantly, some deep insights could be given that motivate researchers to learn the connections and collaborations between natural science and social study, which is our effort to deal with the social-ecological obstacle as well.

Electromagnetic composites: From effective medium theories to metamaterials

Electromagnetic (EM) composites have stimulated tremendous fundamental and practical interests owing to their flexible electromagnetic properties and extensive potential engineering applications. Hence, it is necessary to systematically understand the physical mechanisms and design principles controlling EM composites. In this Tutorial, we first provide an overview of the basic theory of electromagnetism about electromagnetic constitutive parameters that can represent the electromagnetic properties of materials. We show how this corpus allows a consistent construction of effective medium theories and allows for numerical simulation of EM composites to deal with structure–property relationships. We then discuss the influence of spatial dispersion of shaped inclusions in the material medium on the EM properties of composites, which has not been systematically illustrated in the context of this interdisciplinary topic. Next, artificial composites or metamaterials with peculiar properties not readily available in nature are highlighted with particular emphasis on the control of the EM interaction with composites. We conclude by discussing appropriate methods of electromagnetic measurement and practical aspects for implementing composites for specific applications are described. Overall, this Tutorial will serve the purpose of introducing the basics and applications of electromagnetic composites to newcomers in this field. It is also anticipated that researchers from different backgrounds including materials science, optics, and electrical engineering can communicate to each other with the same language when dealing with this interdisciplinary subject and further push forward this advancement from fundamental science to technological applications.

Intelligent Optoelectronic Devices for Next‐Generation Artificial Machine Vision

AbstractMachine vision technology is a thriving interdisciplinary subject to simulate human vision‐related intelligent behaviors, which has played an increasingly important role in various fields, especially in artificial intelligence and big‐data eras. However, the existing silicon‐based machine vision technology (s‐MVT) has been plagued by complex and inefficient von Neumann architecture, thus gradually becoming overwhelmed when handling high‐throughput parallel tasks. The emerging bionic machine vision technology (b‐MVT) with new materials, working principles, and architectures are attracting ever‐increasing attention, which simulates the structure‐function relationship of the human visual system and shows great potential in processing optical information efficiently with low power consumption. In this review, the recent developments achieved in the b‐MVT are summarized, with a particular emphasis on material selection, device fabrication and performance, as well as several popular neural networks for back‐end image recognition. A summary and critical challenges of the b‐MVT are also discussed.

An Overview of an Elective Course on Medical Humanities

Abstract We still lack a tradition of courses on medical humanities designed for medical students, though medical schools in the United States or Western Europe included such courses in their academic curricula more than half a century ago. Such courses have proven their effectiveness in the training of a future doctor, providing them with better abilities to communicate, observe and develop empathy towards the patient. This paper wants to address the problem of the need to deliver such courses that would be even more welcome if all the interdisciplinary topics would gather to give their worthy opinion and perspective on the problem of medical humanities. Such an attempt is still far from being accomplished; therefore, the paper is going to present an attempt to develop an elective course devoted to the topic of medical humanities. With foreign language teachers in charge, such a course could only offer a limited perspective, using fiction as a tool to deal with the students’ cultural training, development of communication skills and understanding of the role of storytelling in medicine. The paper is going to present some examples that can be used in such an elective course on medical humanities in order to reach the above-mentioned goals.