Production Norms Research Articles

Legal Standards for Selenium Enriched Foods and Agricultural Products: Domestic and International Perspectives

Background/Objectives: Selenium is indispensable for human health, yet vast regions worldwide grapple with selenium-deficient soils, rendering dietary intake a critical avenue for supplementation. This narrative review aims to systematically examine and compare domestic and international regulations and standards related to selenium enrichment, providing insights to enhance regulatory frameworks and standardization within the selenium-enrichment industry. Methods: From June to September 2024, we conducted a comprehensive search of official websites belonging to international organizations (e.g., Codex Alimentarius Commission, European Union) and governmental agencies of countries such as China and the United States. Keywords, like “selenium enrichment”, “selenium standards”, and “selenium detection methods”, were employed to identify pertinent regulations, standards, and guidelines encompassing intake benchmarks, detection methodologies, product specifications, technical guidelines for production, labeling requirements, and certification management norms. Results: Our analysis reveals several challenges within the current selenium-enriched regulatory and standardization systems, including inconsistent product determination criteria and limit settings, incomplete technical guidelines for selenium-enriched agricultural production, and a lack of unified regulations for labeling selenium-enriched agricultural products. Conclusions: These findings underscore the need for harmonization of standards and enhanced regulatory oversight. To address these issues, we recommend bolstering safety risk assessments for selenium-enriched agricultural products, establishing and refining a comprehensive standard system for selenium-enriched agriculture, and intensifying quality and safety supervision. This study offers a valuable reference for policymakers and stakeholders to promote the sustainable development of the selenium-enrichment industry.

Surviving academia: Narratives on identity work and intersectionality

AbstractThis paper examines the lived experiences of four early career researchers (ECRs), from various intersecting backgrounds, who pursued their degrees at a prestigious UK university. Bonded through solidarity and care, the authors came together in an online writing group (OWG), which serves as a means of liberation from structural, colonial, and patriarchal oppression. Built upon autoethnographic vignettes, this paper reveals fragile narratives to capture subjective experiences of neglect through the lens of intersectionality and Goffmanian “passing” and “revealing”. Motivated to explore the coping mechanisms of marginalized ECRs, this paper's co‐constructed data collection and co‐generative analysis unpack how a meso‐organization (here, the OWG) allows foreign identities to transcend the constraints of the expected academic professional identity; thus freeing authors from stigma. This paper calls for help and advocates for the urgency of support groups for ECRs as they face issues around finances, political conflicts, and family from pre‐ to post‐COVID‐19 pandemic. Additionally, the research challenges internalized norms of academic productivity and responsibilization and calls for a re‐examination of systemic inequalities. By advocating for collaborative autoethnography and embodied personal storytelling, this study contributes to a richer, more inclusive exploration of intersectionality in academia and emphasizes the need for structural reforms to create more equitable academic environments.

Putting Production at the Centre: Restructuring Process, Labour Automation and Production Norms in an Argentine Factory (1975–2000)

Putting Production at the Centre: Restructuring Process, Labour Automation and Production Norms in an Argentine Factory (1975–2000)

Poetry for Rights! Intergenerational Co-creation for Child Rights Scholarship

This article presents the work of a group of child rights activists including children, young people and a supporting adult, who creatively convey their thoughts and feelings about the most pressing contemporary issues in the field of children’s rights and explore implications for intergenerational co-authorship in the child rights space. The children and young people decided to use poetry as a form of communication to express themselves about the challenges and aspirations of being child rights activists in an era of polycrisis, and they then worked together to analyse the poems, identifying cross-cutting themes around mental health, navigating power relationships and demands for a more inclusive, equitable future. The text of the article contains links to online video recordings of the authors performing their poetry, inviting readers to immerse themselves in a multi-sensory experience of child-led, child rights scholarship. Accordingly, the article presents an exploration of imaginative, interactive and intergenerational scholarship on children’s rights and suggests that co-creation with children may provide a way of upholding children’s rights while making space for new epistemologies that challenge Eurocentric, adultist norms of knowledge production in the child rights space. Keywords: child rights; child participation; arts-based methods.

Inequalities of singular values and unitarily invariant norms for sums and products of matrices

Inequalities of singular values and unitarily invariant norms for sums and products of matrices

Exploration and reflection on the female labor industryin the era of artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) heralds a transformative age in the workforce, marked by heightened efficiencies but also by socio-economic challenges, particularly concerning gender equity. Women, frequently occupying roles susceptible to AI-driven automation, face a disproportionate risk of job displacement. This paper explores AI’s nuanced impact on the employment landscape, where it both exacerbates and mitigates gender disparities. As technology outmoded roles traditionally filled by women, such as those requiring lower technical skills, it also unearthed opportunities for empowerment through remote occupations and increased demand for human-centric expertise. This analysis extends to the cultural and educational underpinnings contributing to the gendered differentiation in technical professions, emphasizing the stereotypes that pigeonhole women as less suited for technical roles. Investigating the imbalances wrought by capitalist values, the study exposes the undervaluation of ‘feminine’ attributes in favor of ‘masculine’ norms of economic productivity. It suggests women’s empowerment in the evolving job market hinges on a systemic shift towards equitable recognition of all work forms, transcending traditional gender roles. In conclusion, redefining work value and leveraging inclusive AI applications emerge as pivotal to counteracting historical biases and ensuring women’s equitable participation alongside men. This comprehensive approach involves reorienting policy, corporate culture, and academic vectors to facilitate a society where diversity is celebrated, and gender parity is achieved. AI, while a disruptor, thus becomes a potential equalizer in the quest for gender-inclusive growth.

Read, write, retreat: a collaborative reflection on shared writing retreat experiences among PhD candidates

ABSTRACT As PhD candidates of geography and planning, we engage in a collaborative autoethnography to reflect on our experiences during a writing retreat. We explore the significance of material and immaterial spaces of the retreat and how these spaces impacted our academic writing. We emphasise the value of a collaborative and supportive learning environment that challenges the productivity-driven, neoliberal narrative imbued in academic writing. Drawing on our personal reflections of the retreat, we illustrate how writing retreats foster a “space” of support, facilitate academic writing competence, and expose participants to new avenues of learning. Using a grounded theory approach, we draw on Donna Haraway’s situated knowledges as well as and Dooren Massey’s theorisation on space, to examine our individual reflections and collectively discuss the intricate relationship between solitude and productivity in academic writing. Our findings delve into diverse experiences of material space (physical) and immaterial space (psychological and imaginative), as well as the negotiation of solitude-togetherness and speed-slowness interface within the retreat context. We argue for rethinking the notion of a retreat, envisioning it as a space that challenges the norms of academic productivity and fosters a more caring and interconnected approach to scholarly writing.

Jurisprudence for the Development of Science: Ideas that Should Not Be Forgotten (To the 100th Anniversary of the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law under the Government of the RF)

The article examines topical issues in regulation and organization of academic activities, which are related to the more than 100-year history of functioning of one of the oldest research institutions in the country – the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law under the Government of the Russian Federation. In the course of the study of archival materials and available publications by the Institute’s employees, some original and currently relevant proposals and hypotheses were identified. They are concerning the organization of research, the direct implementation of academic activities, as well as relations in the field of science subject to legal regulation (in particular, those related to: the distinction of legislation on the scientific and technical process as an independent part in the system of national law in the 1960s; the impossibility of scheduling scientific discoveries; the need to involve researchers (the object of control) in the management process; the “probabilistic” nature of research and the infeasibility of standardization in research work as is the case with setting norms in industrial production; the incorrectness of identification of administrative management in science with academic advising as a specific phenomenon, etc.). These remain relevant to this day. An attempt has been made to correlate the developments of the team of the particular academic organization with the sociopolitical situation in the corresponding historical period and the dominant scientific positions.

Tropical Modeling of Battery Swapping and Charging Station

We propose and investigate a queueing model of a battery swapping and charging station (BSCS) for electric vehicles (EVs). A new approach to the analysis of the queueing model is developed, which combines the representation of the model as a stochastic dynamic system with the use of the methods and results of tropical algebra, which deals with the theory and applications of algebraic systems with idempotent operations. We describe the dynamics of the queueing model by a system of recurrence equations that involve random variables (RVs) to represent the interarrival time of incoming EVs. A performance measure for the model is defined as the mean operation cycle time of the station. Furthermore, the system of equations is represented in terms of the tropical algebra in vector form as an implicit linear state dynamic equation. The performance measure takes on the meaning of the mean growth rate of the state vector (the Lyapunov exponent) of the dynamic system. By applying a solution technique of vector equations in tropical algebra, the implicit equation is transformed into an explicit one with a state transition matrix with random entries. The evaluation of the Lyapunov exponent reduces to finding the limit of the expected value of norms of tropical matrix products. This limit is then obtained using results from the tropical spectral theory of deterministic and random matrices. With this approach, we derive a new exact formula for the mean cycle time of the BSCS, which is given in terms of the expected value of the RVs involved. We present the results of the Monte Carlo simulation of the BSCS’s operation, which show a good agreement with the exact solution. The application of the obtained solution to evaluate the performance of one BSCS and to find the optimal distribution of battery packs between stations in a network of BSCSs is discussed. The solution may be of interest in the case when the details of the underlying probability distributions are difficult to determine and, thus, serves to complement and supplement other modeling techniques with the need to fix a distribution.

Research productivity norms among Canadian I–O psychology scholars.

Research productivity norms among Canadian I–O psychology scholars.

‘É Preciso não Morrer para não Matar’: a Máquina de Guerra

ABSTRACT This paper discusses health promotion and the production of ways to work in the present, especially under the scope of public education in times of neoliberal policies’ intensification. The capitalist machine produces illness throughout work processes, nevertheless we assert that something always gets away and overflows, as production norms, setting resistances that operate what we denominate the war machine. Throughout the research, carried out with municipal public teachers, we propose the understanding that this machine is built of these resistances, by means of which people create coping mechanisms for work controversies, inventing new life norms and expanding health power in/by the craft.

The Impact Of Tourism Village Development On Tourism Business And Community Income Improvement Toward Economic Sustainability

Tourism activities in the village may cause positive and negative impacts for local economy and the sustainability of Tourism destination. This study aims to explain the impact in the development of tourism villages towards of business opportunities, by study on types of business and employment opportunities available in Lerep Tourism Village development, effort to increase community income and economic sustainability from sustainable tourism development in Lerep Tourism Village. The research method used was a qualitative descriptive approach, by conducting in-depth interviews, field observations and document studies that located in Lerep Tourism Village, Semarang Regency. The results of the research obtained, first, there are seven business units business opportunities and employment for local communities. Second, destination Management makes the following efforts in increasing community income: expanding business opportunities, increasing the number of workers, increasing innovation and business licensing, collaborating tour packages, community involvement, and developing tourist attractions. Third, economic sustainability can be realized by involving other supporting aspects, including: Product Aspects, Environment, Socio-Culture, Human Resources, Institutions, Norms, and Pentahelix.

Towards decolonising higher education: a case study from a UK university

This article presents initiatives undertaken by the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM) at King’s College London (KCL), exploring avenues to decolonise higher education institutions (HEI). HEI must integrate anti-racism agendas, challenge the European-centric academic knowledge domination, and dismantle power asymmetries. During the academic year 2021, GHSM executed (1) a gap analysis of undergraduate modules, (2) a course on decolonising research methods taught by global scholars to 40 Global South and North university students who completed pre- and post-course surveys, and (3) semi-structured interviews with 11 academics, and a focus group with four students exploring decolonising HEI; findings were thematically analysed. (1) Gap analysis revealed a tokenistic use of Black and minority ethnic and women authors across modules’ readings. (2) The post-course survey showed that 68% strongly agreed the course enhanced their decolonisation knowledge. (3) The thematic analysis identified themes: (1) Decolonisation is about challenging colonial legacies, racism, and knowledge production norms. (2) Decolonisation is about care, inclusivity, and compensation. (3) A decolonised curriculum should embed an anti-racism agenda, reflexive pedagogies, and life experiences involving students and communities. (4) HEI are colonial, exclusionary constructs that should shift to transformative and collaborative ways of thinking and knowing. (5) To decolonise research, we must rethink the hierarchy of knowledge production and dissemination and the politics of North-South research collaborations. Decolonising HEI must be placed within a human rights framework. HEI should integrate anti-racism agendas, give prominence to indigenous and marginalised histories and ways of knowing, and create a non-hierarchical educational environment, with students leading the decolonisation process.

Feats: A database of semantic features for early produced noun concepts.

Semantic feature production norms have several desirable characteristics that have supported models of representation and processing in adults. However, several key challenges have limited the use of semantic feature norms in studies of early language acquisition. First, existing norms provide uneven and inconsistent coverage of early-acquired concepts that are typically produced and assessed in children under the age of three, which is a time of tremendous growth of early vocabulary skills. Second, it is difficult to assess the degree to which young children may be familiar with normed features derived from these adult-generated datasets. Third, it has been difficult to adopt standard methods to generate semantic network models of early noun learning. Here, we introduce Feats-a tool that was designed to make headway on these challenges by providing a database, the Language Learning and Meaning Acquisition (LLaMA) lab Noun Norms that extends a widely used set of feature norms McRae et al. Behavior Research Methods 37, 547-559, (2005) to include full coverage of noun concepts on a commonly used early vocabulary assessment. Feats includes several tools to facilitate exploration of features comprising early-acquired nouns, assess the developmental appropriateness of individual features using toddler-accessibility norms, and extract semantic network statistics for individual vocabulary profiles. We provide a tutorial overview of Feats. We additionally validate our approach by presenting an analysis of an overlapping set of concepts collected across prior and new data collection methods. Furthermore, using network graph analyses, we show that the extended set of norms provides novel, reliable results given their enhanced coverage.

Semantic feature norms: a cross-method and cross-language comparison

The ability to assign meaning to perceptual stimuli forms the basis of human behavior and the ability to use language. The meanings of things have primarily been probed using behavioral production norms and corpus-derived statistical methods. However, it is not known to what extent the collection method and the language being probed influence the resulting semantic feature vectors. In this study, we compare behavioral with corpus-based norms, across Finnish and English, using an all-to-all approach. To complete the set of norms required for this study, we present a new set of Finnish behavioral production norms, containing both abstract and concrete concepts. We found that all the norms provide largely similar information about the relationships of concrete objects and allow item-level mapping across norms sets. This validates the use of the corpus-derived norms which are easier to obtain than behavioral norms, which are labor-intensive to collect, for studies that do not depend on subtle differences in meaning between close semantic neighbors.

Linear maps preserving -norms of tensor products of matrices

Abstract Let $m,n\ge 2$ be integers. Denote by $M_n$ the set of $n\times n$ complex matrices and $\|\cdot \|_{(p,k)}$ the $(p,k)$ norm on $M_{mn}$ with a positive integer $k\leq mn$ and a real number $p>2$ . We show that a linear map $\phi :M_{mn}\rightarrow M_{mn}$ satisfies $$ \begin{align*}\|\phi(A\otimes B)\|_{(p,k)}=\|A\otimes B\|_{(p,k)} \mathrm{\quad for~ all\quad}A\in M_m\ \mathrm{and}\ B\in M_n\end{align*} $$ if and only if there exist unitary matrices $U,V\in M_{mn}$ such that $$ \begin{align*}\phi(A\otimes B)=U(\varphi_1(A)\otimes \varphi_2(B))V \mathrm{\quad for~ all\quad}A\in M_m\ \mathrm{and}\ B\in M_n,\end{align*} $$ where $\varphi _s$ is the identity map or the transposition map $X\mapsto X^T$ for $s=1,2$ . The result is also extended to multipartite systems.

Epistemic Contests in Journalism: Examining Struggles over Journalistic Ways of Knowing

In the face of struggles over journalistic epistemology arising in the present, this study proposes the concept of “epistemic contests” as a way of analyzing efforts by various actors to shape knowledge production norms and practices. Epistemic contests are not reducible to a single event or example, but instead encompass broader ongoing debates around the legitimacy of various epistemic practices of news. In analyzing these debates, this approach is attuned to the nuances of the present digital media culture as well as the current political and cultural moment. This article lays out key theoretical and methodological components of epistemic contests as applied to journalism and suggests a future research program for digital journalism studies scholars with special attention directed toward journalistic objectivity and its attendant norms. The value of this concept lies in providing a tool to examine the contestation over appropriate knowledge practices, the power to make such distinctions, and the forms of news that emerge.

A Cooperation–Competition Evolutionary Dynamic Model Over Signed Networks

Signed networks are widely applied to describe cooperative and competitive interaction relationships arising from various social, biological and physical systems. In this paper, a cooperation-competition evolutionary dynamic model is offered to explain the gradual evolution of the interaction relationship between neighboring nodes in signed networks. The core feature of our model is to portray the interaction relationship between neighboring nodes as a nonlinear function of the state difference, i.e., neighboring nodes cooperate with each other only if their state difference is within a limited range (called <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">cooperation range</i> ); otherwise they antagonize with each other. We investigate the leader-follower dynamics, and present the lower bound of the convergence rate by using the infinite norm of products of sub-stochastic matrices. For the leaderless dynamics, we establish algebraic conditions with respect to the state differences and the cooperation range for realizing consensus and polarization behaviors. Finally, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the evolution dynamics.

Dual regularized subspace learning using adaptive graph learning and rank constraint: Unsupervised feature selection on gene expression microarray datasets

High-dimensional problems have increasingly drawn attention in gene selection and analysis. To add insult to injury, usually the number of features is greater than number of samples in microarray gene dataset which leads to an ill-posed underdetermined equation system. Poor performance and high computational time for learning algorithms are consequences of redundant features in high-dimensional data. Feature selection is a noteworthy pre-processing method to ameliorate the curse of dimensionality with aim of maximum relevancy and minimum redundancy information preservation. Likewise, unsupervised feature selection has been important since collecting labels for data is expensive. In this paper, we develop a novel robust unsupervised feature selection to select discriminative subset of features for unlabeled data based on rank constrained and dual regularized nonnegative matrix factorization. The major focus of the proposed technique is to discard redundant features while keeping the informative features. Proposed feature selection technique consists of nonnegative matrix factorization to decompose the data into feature weight matrix and representation matrix, inner product norm as regularization for both feature weight matrix and representation matrix, adaptive structure learning to preserve local information and Schatten-p norm as rank constraint. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, numerical studies are conducted on six benchmark microarray datasets. The results show that the proposed technique outperforms eight state-of-art unsupervised feature selection techniques in terms of clustering accuracy and normalized mutual information.

Challenges of introducing video production tasks into the classroom

ABSTRACT Though text formats still dominate in educational contexts, the use of student-produced videos in the classroom is gaining popularity. Here the authors analyse how high school teachers in Catalonia, Spain, implemented video production tasks in their classrooms and the various challenges they faced during the process. The main data collection methods were semi-structured interviews and an online questionnaire to which 1561 teachers responded. The challenges most often cited by teachers are a lack of technological resources, insufficient time to complete more complex video projects, and insufficient training of teachers. Teacher comments also point to concerns about how to make student-produced videos available to different audiences and an imperfect understanding of the ethical procedures. Among suggested solutions to these challenges are the promotion of video-sharing collaboration among teachers, the clear articulation of ethical norms for video production, and the allocation of more time in the school curriculum for video production.