Transformative Lens Research Articles

Educating global citizens in business schools

Purpose– Global citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability are constructs increasingly used in business schools. Yet, there is no widely accepted definition or conceptualization of the global citizen, nor is there strong evidence of how the global citizen is effectively translated into university ethos, culture and practice. This paper aims to conceptualize the global citizen in higher education broadly and more specifically in regard to business schools.Design/methodology/approach– International higher education, social science and business literature has been reviewed to present an integrated understanding of the global citizen; contextualized to higher education generally and business schools specifically.Findings– It is argued that the global citizen, viewed through a moral and transformative cosmopolitan lens, provides an alternative to the rhetoric frequently paid to the construct. This paper describes “global citizen learning” underpinned by the social imaginary, relationality and reflexivity. These virtues equip the students' global business mindset for complexity and ambiguity.Research limitations/implications– The interdisciplinary literature reviewed in this paper brings a focus to moral reasoning, sensitivity and values-based teaching. These aspects create new ways for the global citizen to be more explicitly integrated into business ethos and curricula.Practical implications– Global citizen learning provides the “conceptual glue”, needed to link social responsibility, sustainability and ethical principles to business curricula. Also, the paper outlines how “global citizen learning” can be utilized in existing curricula from a practical perspective.Originality/value– This paper discusses values and moral reasoning in business education. It is proposed that the global citizen conceptualized through moral and transformative cosmopolitanism provides a humanistic buffer to the neoliberal growth paradigm.

Surface Wave Transformation Lens Antennas

A new class of dielectric sheet antennas is presented based on transformation optics. Specifically, we successfully implement the transformation with a consideration of surface wave eigenmode properties, and carry out a practical perforated design by drilling holes to synthesize the required dielectric constants for their potential realization. The full wave simulation shows that our surface wave transformation lens antenna is capable of obtaining a greatly improved directivity, while maintaining the original low profile.

Research support through the lens of transformation in academic libraries with reference to the case of Stellenbosch University Libraries

Changing higher education pedagogy, digitisation of scholarly content and the increasing influence of relevant technologies have impacted on the transformation of academic library services. This paper examines research support through the lens of the transformation of academic library services. The authors have conducted a review of the literature to determine benchmarks by which to measure the research support services delivered by Stellenbosch University. The paper examines academic libraries' attempts to establish the of the librarian for the researcher and the research process. In support of that deeper meaning libraries are providing a new and expanded set of services which includes, inter alia, research data management, curation and preservation; facilitation of open access and bibliometric analysis. Using the research life cycle as a framework, this paper examines the research support services provided by the Stellenbosch University Library and Information Service (SULIS) to the research community. The Research Commons is used as the launch pad for new and innovative services at Stellenbosch. The use of research performance management tools to scan the research landscape, strengthening of self-retrieval of scholarly literature, assistance in the dissemination of research results via publication, and assistance in determining impact factor are all part of the suite of services offered by the Library at Stellenbosch University. The authors conclude that, for academic libraries, there is much to learn and contribute to in this dynamic environment of research production.

A Computerized Model for Lean Performance Measurement

Lean manufacturing had been engraved in the heart of manufacturing practices as one of the corporate strategy to bring the organization to the forefront of business excellence. Organizations are striving to be lean in order to remain globally competitive. From the lens of lean transformation, organizations aim to achieve leanness in their operations and therefore it is important for them to measure lean performance. This paper develops a computerized model based on Analytical Network Process (ANP) to measure lean performance. The results indicated the computerized model for lean performance system is very beneficial for the company. The model has managed to strengthen the team work in the organization which is an important element in a lean system.

University agency in peacebuilding: Perspectives on conflict and development in Kenya

In 2007, Kenya erupted into violence as a result of heavily contested elections. Because identity divisions lay at the heart of the conflict, the nation’s public universities were deeply impacted, at times pitting students, faculty, and staff against one another, and disrupting the ability of Kenyan higher education to contribute to the development process. This qualitative case study explores how faculty and administrators, at two public institutions in a conflict zone, understand and describe their university’s contributions to development. Analyzed through the lens of conflict transformation, the data reveal that the universities changed internal policies and practices to accommodate constituents impacted by the conflict and to cut across conflict lines, and that participants shifted in their thinking about the institution’s internal and external relationships and purposes. The article has two aims. It offers preliminary heuristics for peacebuilding as a university process, providing a framework of practices and policies that engage university constituencies and may transform conflict. It also shows how conflict changed participants’ perspectives about the relationships between themselves, higher education, and development in their country. Further, this article explores a connection between participant beliefs about peacebuilding and development in Kenya.

What Does a Transformative Lens Bring to Credible Evidence in Mixed Methods Evaluations?

AbstractCredibility in evaluation is a multifaceted concept that involves consideration of diverse stakeholders' perspectives and purposes. The use of a transformative lens is proposed as a means to bringing issues of social justice and human rights to the foreground in decisions about methodology, credibility of evidence, and use of evaluation findings. ©Wiley Periodicals, Inc., and the American Evaluation Association.

Development at War

Development at War Armed Humanitarians: The Rise of the Nation Builders Nathan Hodge New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2θπ. 352 pp.Nathan Hodge makes a compelling argument in this intriguing and well-written book. Since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, United States military doctrine, development work, and humanitarian relief have become increasingly interwoven, often with disastrous results. As defense planners and military strategists have given increased attention to stability operations and counterinsurgency campaigns across the Global South, development and nation-building have become central elements of a broader campaign to redirect the futures of and defeated regimes. Reasoning that the most dangerous strains of political radicalism will emerge and prevail in societies afflicted by poverty, ethnic conflict, and a lack of opportunity, senior figures in the Pentagon and the State Department have come to view development as a crucial weapon in a struggle of indefinite duration. What began in late 2001 as a global war on terror, Hodge writes, quietly recast as a campaign of armed social work. And in the process, American foreign policy underwent a tectonic shift (9).As Hodge explains, in the wake of the September π attacks, U.S. policymakers came to view the challenges of national security through the lens of broad social transformation. Pentagon advisers like Thomas Barnett, for example, advocated that U.S. strategy should be reimagined. In place of the old Cold War divide, Barnett and his colleagues envisioned a world split between a core of states integrated into the global economy and a non-integrating gap of states that were outside the channels of international trade, commerce, finance, and growth. In Central Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of Latin America, they argued, the United States would have to prepare to confront terrorist threats, respond to humanitarian crises, intervene in failed states, and engage in prolonged tasks of nation-building. As this view took hold at the highest levels of the Pentagon, it resonated strongly with the conviction of a rising generation of military officers that the United States was unprepared for that challenge. The United States might have an unparalleled ability to fight conventional wars against potential adversaries, but some of the most influential leaders of military policy, including General David Petraeus, believed that the lessons of Afghanistan and Iraq pointed toward the need for a greater counterinsurgency capacity. Because the solutions to such conflicts required a deep engagement in the political, economic, and social terrain, advocates called for a new military mission and a greatly expanded, more versatile force to accomplish it. Development, they insisted, would have to become a central part of U.S. defense strategy.1Hodge illustrates the consequences of this approach in convincing detail, and reading his colorful ground-level narratives a bit like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Following military officers and USAID workers in the field, Hodge's vivid anecdotes reveal the extent to which a combination of practical failures and theoretical fallacies undermined broad, sweeping ambitions. At the operational level, the immediate task of defeating enemies and winning wars sits uneasily alongside the longer-term goals of sustainable development. Building an effective state and a functioning civil society, Hodge argues, is a process that takes decades, often generations (13), yet U.S. Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in Afghanistan and Iraq were charged with obtaining rapid results to undermine an insurgency. As a result, questions of democratic accountability were quickly cast aside, a problem that only grew as the military dealt with personnel shortages by contracting projects out to for-profit firms. If the aspirations of local populations for schools, hospitals, roads, and business opportunities frequently ran counter to the immediate desire of U. …

Experimental realization of a broadband conformal mapping lens for directional emission

We experimentally realize a transformation lens for directional emission at microwave frequencies. The refractive index of the lens, based on the design of conformal mapping, has variation from 1 to 4 inside a semi-circular geometry. By drilling subwavelength holes in dielectric plates inhomogeneously, we design the lens sample. The scanning measurements of the electric field of the lens demonstrate the high directivity of emission, within a broadband working frequency region of 7-11 GHz.

Peace Through Health and Its Potential as a Transformative Lens

Peace Through Health and Its Potential as a Transformative Lens

Metamorphosis and the aesthetics of loss: II. Lady of the woods–The transformative lens of Francesca Woodman

As interpreted by the celebrated American photographer, Francesca Woodman, the myth of Apollo and Daphne forms an allegorical locus for the transitions and tensions of adolescence and young adulthood. Woodman’s employment of this myth and related themes is also expressive of a preoccupying topos of regressive longings. Seamlessly extending Ovid’s transformation of the metamorphic myths into poetic epic, her work delves deeply into their driving purpose: to make sense of change, of loss, and of life itself. Over the millennia, classical myth is infused and enriched with personal meaning by the reanimating, clarifying and transformative lens of art.

Use of the Transformative Framework in Mixed Methods Studies

A concern exists that mixed methods studies do not contain advocacy stances. Preliminary evidence suggests that this is not the case, but to address this issue in more depth the authors examined 13 mixed methods studies that contained an advocacy, transformative lens. Such a lens consisted of incorporating intent to advocate for an improvement in human interests and society through addressing issues of power and social relationships. Included for review were 10 criteria for a transformative study and rigorous procedures for mixed methods research. The findings of this study suggested that several transformative criteria are being used in published mixed methods studies but that some are underutilized. This analysis helped advance eight key elements that authors might use for incorporating a transformative lens into a mixed methods study.

Program transformations for information personalization

Personalization constitutes the mechanisms necessary to automatically customize information content, structure, and presentation to the end-user to reduce information overload. Unlike traditional approaches to personalization, the central theme of our approach is to model a website as a program and conduct website transformation for personalization by program transformation (e.g., partial evaluation, program slicing). The goal of this paper is study personalization through a program transformation lens, and develop a formal model, based on program transformations, for personalized interaction with hierarchical hypermedia. The specific research issues addressed involve identifying and developing program representations and transformations suitable for classes of hierarchical hypermedia, and providing supplemental interactions for improving the personalized experience. The primary form of personalization discussed is out-of-turn interaction—a technique which empowers a user navigating a hierarchical website to postpone clicking on any of the hyperlinks presented on the current page and, instead, communicate the label of a hyperlink nested deeper in the hierarchy. When the user supplies out-of-turn input we personalize the hierarchy to reflect the user's informational need. While viewing a website as a program and site transformation as program transformation is non-traditional, it offers a new way of thinking about personalized interaction, especially with hierarchical hypermedia. Our use of program transformations casts personalization in a formal setting and provides a systematic and implementation-neutral approach to designing systems. Moreover, this approach helped connect our work to human-computer dialog management and, in particular, mixed-initiative interaction. Putting personalized web interaction on a fundamentally different landscape gave birth to this new line of research. Relating concepts in the web domain (e.g., sites, interactions) to notions in the program-theoretic domain (e.g., programs, transformations) constitutes the creativity in this work.

The Stability and Transactivation Potential of the Mammalian MafA Transcription Factor Are Regulated by Serine 65 Phosphorylation

The level of the MafA transcription factor is regulated by a variety of effectors of beta cell function, including glucose, fatty acids, and insulin. Here, we show that phosphorylation at Ser(65) of mammalian MafA influences both protein stability and transactivation potential. Replacement of Ser(65) with Glu to mimic phosphorylation produced a protein that was as unstable as the wild type, whereas Asp or Ala mutation blocked degradation. Analysis of MafA chimeric and deletion constructs suggests that protein phosphorylation at Ser(65) alone represents the initial degradation signal, with ubiquitinylation occurring within the C terminus (amino acids 234-359). Although only wild type MafA and S65E were polyubiquitinylated, both S65D and S65E potently stimulated transactivation compared with S65A. Phosphorylation at Ser(14) also enhanced activation, although it had no impact on protein turnover. The mobility of MafA S65A was profoundly affected upon SDS-PAGE, with the S65E and S65D mutants influenced less due to their ability to serve as substrates for glycogen synthase kinase 3, which acts at neighboring N-terminal residues after Ser(65) phosphorylation. Our observations not only illustrate the sensitivity of the cellular transcriptional and degradation machinery to phosphomimetic mutants at Ser(65), but also demonstrate the singular importance of phosphorylation at this amino acid in regulating MafA activity.

Advancing evaluation of STEM efforts through attention to diversity and culture

AbstractThis chapter examines implications from the application of a transformative lens and the concepts of cultural competency to increase our understanding of how evaluation can contribute to the goal of improving STEM outcomes for underrepresented groups.

For What and for Whom Is Our Research? The Ethical as Transformative Lens in Instructed SLA

In this article, I argue for adopting an ethical lens that interrogates our ends and purposes when generating research on second language learning and teaching, in light of concerns surrounding questions about the uses and users of our work. Such an ethical lens would help us transform our methodological and epistemological debates and would also strengthen the social and educational worth of the research that is generated by diverse second language acquisition (SLA) communities. I offer 3 normative principles for disciplinary discussion: The value of research is to be judged by its social utility; value‐free research is impossible; and epistemological diversity is a good thing. For each principle, I present the thrust of the argument and illustrate it by reference to 1 or more selected problems central to SLA research programs. I end with a broad brush characterization of a field of instructed SLA that is epistemologically diverse and ethically involved in justifying both the methodological rigor and the value commitments of our research programs and our studies. My goal is to open a space for disciplinary dialogue that allows us to engage in the articulation of valued research goals and professional and social responsibilities for the field of instructed SLA.

Many are Chilled but Few are Frozen: How Transformative Learning in Christianity, Science, and Popular Culture Will Lead to the Eventual Demise of Discrimination Against Sexual Minorities in the United States

While this country's historically chilly reception to lesbian, gay and bisexual people cannot be denied, evidence of warming trends abound. Developments in law, science, popular culture, and even Christianity indicate that the ongoing crusade against sexual minorities is not, as news and political pundits would have us believe, at its zenith. Rather, evidence strongly suggests that despite conservative crusaders' zealous efforts to maintain the status quo, discrimination against sexual minorities is on its deathbed. I support a prediction of discrimination's demise by first explaining my conceptualization of behavior-identity compression, a multi-step, synergistic assembly of false assumptions about sexual minorities that fuels myths and stereotypes. Next, I introduce readers to transformative learning, an andragogical theory that explains how humans process information in a way that inspires revisions and reversals of long-held beliefs, perspectives, and even prejudices. Finally, I turn the transformative learning lens on recent developments and events, with resulting analyses pointing inescapably to the conclusion that discrimination against sexual minorities will one day be an historic relic rather than ongoing reality in this country.

Spherical aberration in spatial and temporal transforming lenses of femtosecond laser pulses

We study the influence of third-order spherical aberration on the group velocity dispersion and on the propagation time delay of a plane pulse that is focused by a thin lens. Applications in refractive-diffractive propagation time delay compensation systems and in Gaussian temporal-shaped pulses are analyzed.

Bispectral magnitude and phase recovery using a wide bandwidth acousto-optic processor

A hybrid optical-digital processor has been developed that computes both the magnitude and phase of the bispectrum for wide bandwidth (10 MHz to 1 GHz) rf signals. The overall optical architecture is that of a modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer that contains three acousto-optic modulators and appropriate transforming lenses. The intensity distribution in the output plane of the interferometer contains an interference term that represents the real part of the bispectrum multiplied by a spatial carrier (the interference fringes). To isolate the bispectrum information, the output image is digitized and digitally filtered. The imaginary part of the bispectrum is obtained by Hilbert transforming the real part, and then computing the bispectrum magnitude and phase. The processor is tested with four different combinations of rf test signals. Each signal has a bandwidth of either 6 or 12 MHz. Test results that illustrate the performance of the processor in the recovery of magnitude and phase information for the bispectrum of quadratically related signals are presented.

Optical diffractometry with directionally variable incident lightwaves

Diffraction pattern representation of images (optical Fourier transform or Wiener spectrum) is very useful for computer image processing. An accurate analysis of spatial frequencies requires very well corrected lenses, and the diffraction pattern must be sampled by means of a moving detector or a stable multiple detector array strictly in the Fourier plane. A theoretical analysis of obtaining and sampling the diffraction pattern is provided. Fourier diffractometry with a directionally changed incident light wave can be realized without the above-mentioned limitations. In this method, a single static detector is placed at the rear focus of a Fourier transform lens while the sampled diffraction pattern is moved over the Fourier plane. Suitable movement of the diffraction pattern can be obtained when the analyzed image is continuously illuminated with a parallel light beam whose inclination is changed with respect to the optical axis of the Fourier transform lens. This idea was tesied experimentally and applied to a new generation of compact diffractometers with unsophisticated transforming lenses.

Aberration Theory Applied to Design of Fourier Transform Lens Systems

Aberration Theory Applied to Design of Fourier Transform Lens Systems