Key Ideas Research Articles

Composing Worlds: A Portuguese Transdisciplinary Network in Humanities, Health and Well-Being

The project “Composing worlds: humanities, health and well-being in the 21st century” aims to build a network of experts in the humanities, social and health sciences, who think about health and well-being in contemporary technological societies. The relevance of this project is based on the growing evidence that most of the problems that the 21st century will face, particularly in the area of health and well-being, relate to the way in which humans connect to the environment, to non-human beings, to different cultures and to technologies. Its main goal is to bring out personal and well-founded ideas on these issues and to reflect on how the humanities may help with difficult environmental, social and technological issues. The methodology used in the first phase of the project consists of an open answer interview, built in a participatory way by the network of experts, and of a thematic analysis of the answers. It is an exploratory research project, which uses thematic analysis to identify the key ideas of each author, and to induce the corresponding main themes. The themes are then organized by semantic correspondence into thematic clusters. The thematic axes are abstracted from these clusters, and they constitute the vectors to be developed in the second phase of the project, by proposing their integration into university curricula, research and intervention of social, cultural and community outreach. Some of these developments are already in place.

An answer to everything? Four framings of girls’ schooling and gender equality in education

ABSTRACT Girls’ education has been widely promoted as the answer to a wide range of problems. This article maps four key ideas that have framed this formulation. These are firstly, a techno-rationalist approach linked to narrowly defined interventions, termed here ‘what works’. Secondly, a more normative engagement is outlined, termed ‘what matters’ which explores how girls’ education is part of processes to extend and defend rights, support feminism or decoloniality. Thirdly, an approach termed ‘what disorganises’ looks at the ways in which girls’ education has been used deceitfully and hypocritically to mask the perpetuation of unjust power. Lastly, an approach termed ‘what connects’ maps processes associated with building connections and epistemologies of co-ordination The implications of these four framings are considered for the development of discussions on girls’ education and gender equality and methods in comparative education.

A content analysis of alignment messages to the Next Generation Science Standards

Teachers are a critical component to standards-based reform systems, which require that reforms conceived at the national level pass through several layers of the educational system before impacting learning in the classroom. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) are an example of this type of reform and pose significant challenges for alignment between levels given their three-dimensional nature alongside inclusion of ambitious and novel reform ideas. To examine translation of NGSS reforms across levels, we provide a content analysis of alignment messages conveyed to teachers through practitioner literature. Analysis indicates some coherence with national messaging around alignment to performance expectations and science and engineering practices. Additionally, alignment to broader reform ideas like engaging in science practices, integration, engineering, and focus on phenomena were represented to teachers. However, qualitative analysis of these representations indicate that reforms are often superficially portrayed, variably defined, or missing altogether. Findings indicate that teachers receive numerous messages regarding what it means to align to the NGSS and few elaborations on how to operationalize reforms. Our work suggests a need for intentional consideration of how to design representations for practitioners that consider teacher sensemaking around novel reforms. Additionally, we see a need for further development of coherence among the research community regarding alignment to the NGSS and agreement on definition of key reform ideas. Future work should consider how teachers use and understand these representations as they enact the NGSS in their local contexts.

Proceedings of the 2022 NHLBI and OASH state of the science in transfusion medicine symposium.

State of the Science (SoS) meetings are used to define and highlight important unanswered scientific questions. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), National Institutes of Health, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH), Department of Health and Human Services held a virtual SoS in transfusion medicine (TM) symposium. In advance of the symposium, six multidisciplinary working groups (WG) convened to define research priorities in the areas of: blood donors and the supply, optimizing transfusion outcomes for recipients, emerging infections, mechanistic aspects of components and transfusion, new computational methods in transfusion science, and impact of health disparities on donors and recipients. The overall objective was to identify key basic, translational, and clinical research questions that will help to increase and diversify the volunteer donor pool, ensure safe and effective transfusion strategies for recipients, and identify which blood products from which donors best meet the clinical needs of specific recipient populations. On August 29-30, 2022, over 400 researchers, clinicians, industry experts, government officials, community members, and patient advocates discussed the research priorities presented by each WG. Dialogue focused on the five highest priority research areas identified by each WG and included the rationale, proposed methodological approaches, feasibility, and barriers for success. This report summarizes the key ideas and research priorities identified during the NHLBI/OASH SoS in TM symposium. The report highlights major gaps in our current knowledge and provides a road map for TM research.

Developing Animal Theology: An Engagement with Leonardo Boff

Developing Animal Theology: An Engagement with Leonardo Boff

“Tint and Form”: The Geometric Philosophy Underlying Oliver Byrne’sElements

AbstractOliver Byrne published his groundbreaking and visually remarkable edition of Euclid’s Elements in 1847. The book is extraordinary, featuring four-color diagrams, illustrations, grids, and decorative engraving. Its aesthetic similarity to various stylistic themes of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements has been noted, but little attention has been paid to the pedagogical and theoretical insights that shaped Byrne’s illustrative choices. In this article, the author explains some key philosophical ideas underlying Byrne’s geometric illustrations and contextualizes them amid Byrne’s wider mathematical preoccupations.

Building Blocks for Critical Reviews in Health Professions Education

Building Blocks for Critical Reviews in Health Professions Education

Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet Culture by Jenny Kaminer

Reviewed by: Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet Culture by Jenny Kaminer Tamar Koplatadze Haunted Dreams: Fantasies of Adolescence in Post-Soviet Culture. By Jenny Kaminer. (NIU Series in Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies) Ithaca, NY, and London: Northern Illinois University Press. 2022. xiii+188 pp. £39. ISBN 978-1-501-76219-2. Jenny Kaminer's monograph breaks new ground in Anglophone criticism through its large-scale examination of cultural representations of adolescence in Russia since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Kaminer poses a pertinent key question: 'Do Soviet cultural models continue to dominate, or have they been transcended?' (p. 3). In reply, she adopts a historical approach based on close readings of selected works of post-Soviet Russian prose fiction, drama, TV, and, to a lesser extent, film. All of these foreground teenage characters and thus 'facilitate the historicization of contemporary Russian fantasies of adolescence' (p. 3). The author focuses on three specific elements which, as she argues, reveal how these fantasies have mutated or, conversely, remained constant since Soviet times, namely: violence, temporality, and the representation of gender and the body. By choosing Russia for her case study, Kaminer makes an important contribution to global studies of the 'adolescent turn', which until recently have overlooked the former Soviet Union. Kaminer's masterful Introduction connects her findings to current events, presenting sophisticated key ideas in accessible language. This section makes enjoyable reading for both specialists and non-specialists. Her elegant, engaging prose style is maintained throughout, with clear conceptual linkage between chapters. Chapter 1, a powerful essay that could be extended into an independent monograph, examines how adolescent female protagonists usurp saintly martyrdom from [End Page 280] Soviet heroes, while exposing the flaws of post-Soviet Russian society. Chapter 2 depicts monstrous and murderous teens, in creative works that malign the sacrificial Soviet heroes. Chapter 3 examines New Russian drama, to suggest that 'heroic impulses remain, but the historical and social context now renders them superfluous' (p. 94). Chapter 4 is the most theoretically intricate, building on various iterations of the chronotope to examine Russian youth's disillusioned navigation of the uncanny overlaps of past, present, and future on screen. In Kaminer's reading, all of these works share a pessimistic vision of the possibility of Russian social renewal, while rejecting the idealization of Soviet-era adolescent heroes. Her Conclusion returns to today's world with a thought-provoking overview of the Greta Thunberg phenomenon. Kaminer's analysis is rigorous and convincing throughout, with excellent historical contextualization, especially where she engages with Soviet cultural history and the mythology surrounding adolescent heroes such as Zoia Kosmodemianskaia and Pavlik Morozov. Close readings are consistently nuanced, reinforced with sound methodology, and established theories of adolescence—such as Nancy Lesko's concept of the adolescent chronotope—are usefully adapted to the post-Soviet context. This monograph's subtitle, though, is misleading, if not problematic, because it employs the chronological denotation 'post-Soviet' in a manner inconsistent with Kaminer's actual geographical focus (exclusively on Russia). Sometimes the terms 'Russian' and 'post-Soviet' are employed interchangeably, the latter being used to refer to Russian history and society (see pp. 28 and 36), a particularly insensitive faux pas in the light of contemporary Russia's recent geopolitical imperialism. One might wonder why this political dimension of Russian post-Soviet teenagerhood did not receive more attention in the monograph. Skinhead culture, hegemonic military masculinities, absent father figures, and a lack of positive role models (the latter category arguably replaced by Putin's performative public persona) are all topics that deserved prominence in this study. They are apposite to Kaminer's investigation of how Russian society's anxiety over identity formation, and the militarization of Russian youth, play out in dynamics of violence, temporality, and gender. Some indication as to why the author chose to prioritize specific texts and themes would have been helpful, as would greater contextualization of the selected texts within depictions of adolescence in the broader post-Soviet world. Finally, some examination of the responses to the texts from adolescent readers and viewers themselves, as well as insights from creative artists through interviews, would have made this monograph...

Introduction: Power, Poverty, and Knowledge – Reflecting on 50 Years of Learning with Robert Chambers

Robert Chambers is one of the most influential and prolific scholars to write about participation, poverty, and knowledge in development studies. His books, chapters, and papers have revolutionised the discipline, inspiring both participatory processes and more inclusive practice. Perhaps not as well known are the articles he authored for the IDS Bulletin. This Archive Collection explores Robert’s contributions to the journal across five decades with a view to resurfacing buried gems of development studies theory and reinvigorating debates about how the sector can improve: it collates his most important articles and presents a new introduction reflecting on key ideas and offering a critical analysis of the common themes throughout Robert’s work. New perspectives discuss how theories have changed over time, and the continued relevance of key ideas. The articles reproduced here show not only how Robert’s thinking evolved but also hint at broader changes in strategic focus for the Institute of Development Studies itself, as well as development theory in general.

Automatic text summarization–A systematic literature review

Automatic summarization is the act of computationally condensing a set of data to produce a subset (a summary) that captures the key ideas or information within the original text. To do this, artificial intelligence algorithms that are tailored for diverse sorts of data are frequently created and used. Ten research articles considering databases like IEEE, Scopus, and Springer Nature have been considered. The paradigm shift that AI has created in the field of Automatic Text Summarization is discussed in detail.

US Invasion of Iraq, 2003: Indirect Link of ISIS Rising

This study will describe an indirect link of the US Invasion of Iraq (2003) and test how the US occupation of Iraq served, from an American perspective, as a derivative product with negative side effects several years later in the Middle East. In seeking to understand the dynamic of any event in foreign policy, political scientists need to be aware of the role and spread of key ideas and how they emerged, developed, and eventually influenced events. Accordingly, analysis of existing perceptions should also consider the critical impacts of past events and crises. “The power of the ideas,” as presented by the rebirth of the ancient idea of the Muslim Caliphate, was mostly covert throughout the years. However, understanding this event requires examining the formative influence of the US Invasion of Iraq (2003), which ended with the Islamic State taking power in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). This radical group has declared a Muslim Caliphate and claims control over a large area of Iraq and Syria.

Esthetic considerations for treating the patient of European descent: Thriving in diversity international roundtable series

The European esthetic experience is informative for understanding both innovation as well as how to care for patients of various backgrounds and ages. To discuss best practices for treating the European population and how these approaches may be applied to patient populations across the globe. In support of clinicians who wish to serve a diverse patient population, a 6-part, international roundtable series focused on diversity in esthetics was conducted from August 24, 2021 to May 16, 2022. In each roundtable, expert clinicians were invited to contribute and share best practices. The results of the fifth roundtable in the series, the European Patient, are described here. Key ideas include the growing number of people over the age of 65 years in Europe and the management of this more mature patient population; the role of functional anatomy in treating patients with both fillers and botulinum toxin; and the role of ultrasound in clinical practice for mapping vasculature. While there is no typical European face, there is much to be learned from thoughtful consideration of how to best manage more mature patients as well as how to use minimally invasive modalities, such as injectables, efficiently to achieve natural-looking results.

Shakespeare and Montaigne. Edited by Lars Engle, Patrick Gray, and William M. Hamlin

Lars Engle usefully explains (p. 38) that the sixteen chapters in this edited volume are divided into those which draw a comparison between Montaigne and Shakespeare and those which argue for an influence of the first on the second. Yet the beauty of this volume is that other understandings of its organization and purpose are also richly available. For instance, Colin Burrow’s careful preface raises an implicit question that is central to the volume’s overall concerns: is any syncrisis between the essayist and the playwright a matter of exact verbal parallels or of a conference, a conferring, a vibration through moments of empathy and silent, perhaps even accidental, affinity? Burrow’s deliberate unpicking of the notion of source as being inadequate to the task of what reading — let alone imitation — might mean in this debate is followed by N. Amos Rothschild’s contribution on the rhetoric of imitation, and then further refracted in Peter G. Platt’s ‘hovering and haunting’ (p. 242), in Richard Scholar’s delicate probing of Shakespeare’s and Montaigne’s rhetorical manner as well as matter, and in The Tempest’s ‘essay-like processes of thought’ analysed by Engle (p. 56). In a not dissimilar vein, Richard Hillman discusses the imitative generic patterns of tragedy and comedy. A second thematic strand studies how or whether Shakespeare and Montaigne can speak to our modernity: Anita Gilman Sherman interrogates selfhood, William McKenzie narcissism, and David Schalkwyk gender; in the book’s longest chapter (forty-seven pages), Patrick Gray proposes a dissenting view of liberalism. Likewise, there is a marked philosophical edge to a number of chapters — another thematic undercurrent. Maria Devlin McNair uses Bernard Williams’s notion of moral luck, Cassie M. Miura deploys Stanley Cavell, and Zorica Bečanović-Nikolić examines subjectivity through the writings of Paul Ricœur; Pyrrhonism occurs in chapters by Alison Calhoun, Richard Dillane, and William M. Hamlin, while Daniel Vitkus champions a neo-pagan reading of Antony and Cleopatra. Alongside this prismatic sense of the chapters, with each change of perspective bringing a new dimension of Shakespeare and Montaigne into view, the volume also reflexively enlarges on and assesses its own emphases through its abundant paratexts — a preface, two introductions, and two afterwords. They fulfil diverse functions. Hamlin offers a history of criticism about Shakespeare and Montaigne, whereas Engle views the pair in terms of thought-experiments. The afterwords, by contrast, tend to be contestatory. Thus, echoing Gray, George Hoffmann warns us not to take Montaigne straightforwardly as our liberal ancestor and, like Burrow, sees the self chiefly as a product of performance albeit now in a philosophical, sceptical mode. Meanwhile, Katharine Eisaman Maus points up some of the differences rather than the similarities between the playwright and the essayist. Curiously, none of the contributions considers whether oral transmission through report, news, or even word of mouth among circles of acquaintances might have played any part in Shakespeare’s encounter with the Essais. This reservation notwithstanding, the volume offers a wide-ranging yet coherent body of reflection and represents a distinguished and stimulating illustration of the key themes, ideas, and approaches in its field.

The politics of depopulation in Japanese municipalities: Ideas and underlying ideologies

ABSTRACT Recent research has tried to understand Japan’s depopulating countryside and regions through the comparative theory of “peripheralization”. Though these studies argue that a critical determinant of peripheralization in depopulating communities is a lack of political agency, few studies systematically investigate the internal and electoral politics of adapting to depopulation. This paper investigates one aspect of this process: how elected officials and candidates position themselves and contest issues concerning depopulation. We start by analyzing the ideas driving politics in two policy areas related to shrinking populations: 1) various measures aimed at attracting young families and people to relocate to the municipality and 2) the closure and merger of public schools. The article maps the key ideas and assumptions driving policies to adapt and combat depopulation. We find two ideas – what we call “populationism” and “listenism” – prevalent in the discourse. In addition, we find contestation about depopulation largely disconnected from broader ideological debates about the role and size of the state, prioritizing community over individual interests, or being more open or closed as a community, etc.

Data-driven inference of complex system dynamics: A mini-review

Our ability to observe the network topology and nodes' behaviors of complex systems has significantly advanced in the past decade, giving rise to a new and fast-developing frontier—inferring the underlying dynamical mechanisms of complex systems from the observation data. Here we explain the rationale of data-driven dynamics inference and review the recent progress in this emerging field. Specifically, we classify the existing methods of dynamics inference into three categories, and describe their key ideas, representative applications and limitations. We also discuss the remaining challenges that are worth the future effort.

The Development of Entrepreneurial Marketing

There has been a growing interest in the area of entrepreneurial marketing. Both conceptual studies and empirical papers have been published at an increasing frequency in the past three decades. However, this research area remains scattered, with various conceptualizations, definitions, and approaches to researching entrepreneurial marketing proposed in the literature. To help integrate the different thoughts and findings in entrepreneurial marketing, we trace scholarly discussions of entrepreneurial marketing back to the early pioneers in this field, review key ideas and frameworks that have been developed over time, and propose the concept of the Entrepreneurial Marketing Cycle (EMC). The EMC concept incorporates past findings and will help develop future research in entrepreneurial marketing.

Crimes against non‐human animals: Examining dog fighting in the UK and the USA through a green criminology perspective

AbstractThis article reviews the social scientific literature published between the late 1990s and 2021 on the illegal ‘sport’ of dog fighting in the UK and USA. Adopting a green criminological perspective, it argues that studying dog fighting is important for understanding the ways in which this form of animal cruelty contributes to a range of social and animal harms. The review is structured in five sections. The first situates the review theoretically by introducing key ideas within green criminology that will inform the discussion. The next section presents a typology of the different levels of dog fighting in both countries. The third section then explores both the motivations of contemporary dog fighters, as well as the justifications they deploy to defend their ‘sport’ to outsiders. The fourth section then adopts a green criminological perspective to explore the various social and animal harms associated with dog fighting. The final section then brings the threads of the discussion together and highlights some directions for future research.

Analysis of scalable channel estimation in FDD massive MIMO

One of the key ideas for reducing downlink channel acquisition overhead for FDD massive MIMO systems is to exploit a combination of two assumptions: (i) the dimension of channel models in propagation domain may be much smaller than the next-generation base-station array sizes (e.g., 64 or more antennas), and (ii) uplink and downlink channels may share the same low-dimensional propagation domain. Our channel measurements demonstrate that the two assumptions may not always hold, thereby impacting the predicted performance of methods that rely on the above assumptions. In this paper, we analyze the error in modeling the downlink channel using uplink measurements, caused by the mismatch from the above two assumptions. We investigate how modeling error varies with base-station array size and provide both numerical and experimental results. We observe that modeling error increases with the number of base-station antennas, and channels with larger angular spreads have larger modeling error. Utilizing our modeling error analysis, we then investigate the resulting beamforming performance rate loss. Accordingly, we observe that the rate loss increases with the number of base-station antennas, and channels with larger angular spreads suffer from higher rate loss.

Autonomous Platoon Control With Integrated Deep Reinforcement Learning and Dynamic Programming

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is regarded as a potential method for car-following control and has been mostly studied to support a single following vehicle. However, it is more challenging to learn a stable and efficient car-following policy when there are multiple following vehicles in a platoon, especially with unpredictable leading vehicle behavior. In this context, we adopt an integrated DRL and Dynamic Programming (DP) approach to learn autonomous platoon control policies, which embeds the Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG) algorithm into a finite-horizon value iteration framework. Although the DP framework can improve the stability and performance of DDPG, it has the limitations of lower sampling and training efficiency. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, namely Finite-Horizon-DDPG with Sweeping through reduced state space using Stationary approximation (FH-DDPG-SS), which uses three key ideas to overcome the above limitations, i.e., transferring network weights backward in time, stationary policy approximation for earlier time steps, and sweeping through reduced state space. In order to verify the effectiveness of FH-DDPG-SS, simulation using real driving data is performed, where the performance of FH-DDPG-SS is compared with those of the benchmark algorithms. Finally, platoon safety and string stability for FH-DDPG-SS are demonstrated.

A novel Block Bi‐diagonalization based pre‐coding scheme for bit error reduction in mutiple input multiple output‐orthogonal frequency division multiplexing

SummaryThe MIMO‐OFDM increases spectral efficiency without the use of channel state information (CSI). However, the bit error rate (BER) in the MIMO‐OFDM model increases dramatically due to the increase in nonlinear distortion in the power amplifier (PA). In this research, a novel pre‐coder integrated MIMO‐OFDM technology is designed for effective BER reduction, and its performance is analyzed. The discrete wavelet‐based OFDM system is one of the key ideas to present good orthogonal by emphasizing orthogonal wavelets. It helps to mitigate inter‐symbol interference (ISI) and noise within the channel by extending the bandwidth (BW) compared to conventional OFDM systems. But, DWT‐OFDM highly suffered due to downsampling, which degrades system efficiency. To overcome this, a redundant discrete wavelet transform (RDWT) is proposed in this article to enhance spectral efficiency. For modulation, 16‐bit quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is introduced in this work. In addition to this, a block bi‐diagonalization (BBD) pre‐coder technique is proposed to mitigate unwanted noise and interference in the MIMO‐OFDM system. The performance measures such as ergodic sum capacity, BER, throughput, average jitter noise power, mean square error (MSE), and power consumption are analyzed using the MATLAB platform. The proposed method obtains the ergodic sum capacity of 6.25 bps/Hz, a BER of 0.021, a throughput of 95.2%, MSE of −0.47, and a power consumption of 1.15 μW. The simulative results prove the efficacy of the proposed method.